Planning Commission Regular Meeting/Work Session

Music Good evening. Welcome to the regularly scheduled meeting of the City of Fairfax Planning Commission for Monday, June 8, 2026. First Order of Business is the Pledge of Allegiance. Please join me. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Our next Order of Business is discussion and adoption of the agenda. The agenda was issued publicly as required. Are there any comments or proposed changes to the agenda? Mr. Chairman, I move the agenda be adopted as presented. Second. So move and seconded to adopt the agenda as presented. All those in favor, say aye.

Aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Motion passes unanimously. Next Order of Business is presentations by the public. On any matter, not calling for a public hearing. We have no public hearings this evening, so this is the opportunity, if anyone would like to address the Planning Commission, to do so. Is there anyone who would like to speak to us at this time? Seeing none, we will move on. Next item of business is consideration of the May 11th, 2026 meeting minutes. Those as well were issued ahead of the meeting as required. Are there any changes, comments, or corrections to those? Mr. Chair, I move that the Commission adopt the May 11th, 2026 regular meeting minutes as issued. Second. It's been moved and seconded to adopt the minutes as presented.

All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Passes unanimously. Next item of business is an item that does not require a public hearing. It's a motion to amend Chapter 110 of the Code of the City of Fairfax, Virginia, which is the zoning ordinance. Mr. Napty. Thank you, Chair Feather. This motion is to initiate amendments to the zoning ordinance related to accessory dwelling units. This is a topic that has been under discussion for quite some time. Planning Commission and City Council have both held multiple work sessions on this. And staff is now prepared to present final recommendations to the Planning Commission. By initiating these amendments tonight, then staff will be able to return to you at your next meeting on June 22nd for a public hearing and provide a full staff report at that time.

Are there any questions for staff? If not, we'll entertain a motion. Mr. Chair, I move that in accordance with good zoning practice and in support of the public interest and general welfare, that the City of Fairfax Planning Commission initiate amendments to Chapter 110 of the Code of the City of Fairfax, Virginia, as part of the regular review and maintenance of the zoning ordinance, articles, and sections contained therein, including but not limited to introductory provisions, zoning districts, and regulations, and definitions. And I further move that a public hearing be scheduled for consideration of these amendments. Second. Second. Been moved and seconded. Any further questions or discussions?

If not, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Motion passes unanimously. Okay. We will recess our... We have no public hearings. As I mentioned, we'll recess our regular meeting and go into our work sessions. We have two items this evening. The first is a post-submission work session to receive feedback from the Planning Commission on a proposed zoning map amendment for rezoning, a special use permit, special exceptions, and a major certificate of appropriateness for property located at 4085 to 4117 Chainbridge Road. Welcome, Mr. Frederick. Thank you for being here. Good evening, everyone. This is a post-submission work session for Christopher Lane, LLC. The applicant submitted a formal application on December 8, 2025.

The plans under consideration for tonight's discussion were submitted on April 8, 2026. Staff has provided a written staff report and second review comments to the applicant's representative. The city council work session is scheduled for July 7, 2026. The applicant has submitted a zoning map amendment from commercial office to commercial urban while retaining the transition overlay district and approval of a general development plan with proffers for three buildings to include up to 392 apartments, up to 29,639 square feet of office, up to 7,747 square feet of retail, and 637 structured parking spaces and 18 service parking spaces on 3.87 acres. In addition to the rezoning request, the applicant has requested a special use permit for a multifamily in the commercial urban district

and several special exceptions, which we'll cover later in the presentation. And finally, the applicant has submitted a major certificate of appropriateness for architecture and landscaping. The subject site is located between Chambers Road and University Drive across from Fairfax County Judicial Complex to the west, a two-story office building in the activity center, place type to the north, a single-family home in the activity center, place type to the south, which was approved for up to 276 apartments and office and retail. That project is known as the Davies property. And a three-story townhome community across University Drive and an office building to the east in the activity place center type.

Once again, the site is approximately 3.87 acres. The small area plan provides for more specific recommendations on issues such as land use, open space, and transportation. They know it's provided in a comprehensive plan for areas defined as activity centers on the future land use map. The recommendations for each plan supersedes the general activity, place type recommendations. As you know, this subject property is in the Old Town small area plan. In the short term, the plan recommends that the existing offices be renovated with new ground level engagement on Chambers Road, consolidation and development into commercial, non-residential uses are recommended. Residential uses at this location is not recommended based on the Old Town small area plan.

And then finally, the existing office market will undergo updates during the medium term, but most new development will be concentrated in the Fairfax County Judicial Complex. While it is difficult to predict the future, the small area plan provides some benchmarks for the near-term horizon of the next 15 years. So, the applicant has provided information towards the near-term development of 15 years. So, in terms of residential, you're looking at up to 392 units. The short-term increase would be 1,250 residential units. Office space, the small area plan would like to see an increase of 25,000 gross square feet of new office space. The applicant is proposing 29,639 square feet of office space.

And finally, the applicant is proposing up to 7,740 square feet of retail. The small area plan is looking to increase the amount of retail and the activation of currently vacant retail space within the small area plan. The applicant is not proposing any hotels or institutional uses at this time. Again, the current zoning is commercial office. And the proposed zoning is commercial urban. Within a transition overlay district and the CU district, upper-story residential mixed-use is permitted. The density within the TOD is a maximum of 20 general and 24 affordable dwelling units. So, the applicant has provided density that exceeds this. So, a special exception would be required. In terms of the general development plan, the applicant proposes to develop three buildings with up to 392 apartments,

approximately 7,740 square feet of retail, that's approximately 29,639 square feet of office, a east-west private drive of 26 feet in width from University Drive to Chambers Road, a north-south greenway between building A and building C connecting to the northern property line. The applicant also proposed constructing two levels of parking underneath all three buildings, as well as provide surface parking for non-residential uses on Chambers Road. The applicant proposes to connect building A and building B on level 3 over the private street, and a connection between building B and building C on level 3 over the greenway. So, just to orientate everyone to the site, this is considered building A, if you can follow my cursor.

Building A is proposed as 72 units with retail and office on the ground floor fronting Chambers Road. The remaining areas on the ground floor consist of lobby areas for non-residential and residential uses. The second floor is proposed as office space of 14,628 square feet of office, and then the remaining floors consist of residential apartments. The proposed building height for building A is approximately 73 feet and at six stories. Building B is fronting along Chamber Drill to follow my cursor. Building B is proposed as 154 units, approximately 4,342 square feet of office, and 6,325 square feet of amenities space on the ground floor. The remaining floors would be comprised of residential apartments.

The building height proposed for building B is approximately 70 feet, and that's six stories. Building C, front along University Drive. Building C is proposed as a standalone residential building of 164 units. The applicant proposes a amenity space, fitness center facing University Drive on level 4. Level 4 and level 5 have a step back of approximately 25 feet to 34 feet on University Drive, while level 6 has a step back of 135 feet on the north side of the building and 60 feet on the south side of the building. The applicant is proposing the building height of approximately 76.5 feet for building C and proposed as six stories. The applicant proposes a north-south greenway between building B and building C.

The greenway extends to the property line on the east side of building A. The greenway is approximately 15 feet in width with a fountain on the north side of the private street. In addition to the greenway, the applicant has provided sidewalks connecting building B and building C, and providing pedestrian connections along University Drive and Chambridge Road, as well as on the south side of the private street. The applicant has proposed the private street to be at a width of 26 feet, with four parallel spaces on the north side, and three loading zone spaces on the south side, in between building B and the greenway. So here's a slide that shows the pedestrian. Sorry, one second. So the building coverage,

the building coverage for the property has a max coverage of 80%. The proposed coverage is approximately 54%, and the lot coverage is a maximum of 90%, and the applicant's proposing lot coverage of approximately 85%. The applicant has proposed right-of-way dedication, which changes the parcel data and calculations, so the applicant will need to update the information to provide the revised building coverage and lot coverage for the site. Slide shows the pedestrian access, which I described earlier. So there's connections around Chambridge Road and University, on the south side of the private street, and between building A and the private street connecting to the greenway. Again, the greenway is approximately 15 feet of paved surface.

However, the area varies in width along the greenway. And then the vehicle access is provided through a private street running east-west, right in, right out on Chambridge Road, with full access on University Drive. The applicant is proposing some surface parking, but the primary parking location is with a structured parking underneath the buildings. There's two levels. The entrance from Chambridge Road, excuse me, from the private street into building C leads to the upper level, and then the access from University extends into the lower level. There are three loading spaces provided, and the applicant has provided a trash dumpster access from University. So here's a look at the lower level parking garage

and the access provided from University. And here's a look at the upper level parking garage from the private street. The applicant is required to have a tree canopy of 10%. The applicant is providing approximately 10.7%. That number will need to be adjusted just like the, based on the right-of-way dedication. So all the calculations will need to be adjusted with the next submission. The applicant is providing five canopy trees along University Drive and 10 canopy trees along Chambridge Road. The applicant is required to have a special use permit for building C, which is a standalone multifamily building. Multifamily requires a special use permit in the CU district. The applicant has provided a number of,

has requested a number of special exceptions, and I'll try to quickly walk through those special exceptions. The first one is 75% of the ground floor for building B. The applicant has proposed retail and office for building B. However, the applicant has not reached the 75% of the ground floor for non-residential uses, so the applicant wouldn't need the special exception. In terms of the density for the overall project, the density in the commercial urban is max at 24. The applicant is exceeding that density, and the density is approximately 101 dwelling units per acre. So, in terms of the building height, the applicant is exceeding the building height requirement for CU and the TOD, or within the TOD that's capped at 48 feet.

The next slide will actually give a visual of that building height and the applicant requests to exceed the building height. In terms of the requirement for a landscape strip and street trees along the access drive, here's a location for that special exception, so on the north side and the south side. The applicant has provided a future access easement proposed on the north side, in front of building C. The applicant is required to provide vehicular access to non-residential properties. So, on the screen you'll see a red line on the south side of the property, and also on the northern side of the property, and the eastern side of the property adjacent to the office building that fronts on University.

And the last exception for this slide is for the northern side. So, in blue you'll see the requirement to eliminate the sidewalk on the northern side of the proposed access drive. So, this exception applies to the height. So, the applicant is limited to 48 feet. The applicant is proposing six stories and a max of 76 and a half feet. And just should mention that the small area plan recommends that the site be limited to four stories along University and five stories along Chambers Road. The applicant has provided some renderings to show the proposed architecture. And so, this is a view looking from the southeast along Chambers Road. A view looking to the northeast from Chambers Road. A view looking on the southeast along Chambers Road.

Another view looking on University Drive and the private street that's proposed looking to the southwest. A view looking to the east on University Drive. A view looking to the northwest along University and also the private street to be constructed by others, which is on the Davies property. And outstanding issues. The outstanding issues are in your packet. And the applicant will address these issues with their presentation. The next steps. The Board of Architecture review will meet to discuss the proposed architecture on June 17th. City Council has a work session for July 7th. After that, the applicant will provide resubmitted plans and support documentation prior to any public hearings. The applicant will come back before Planning Commission and a public hearing.

The BAR has a public hearing. And the City Council would have a final hearing for this application. And that concludes my presentation. I'll stand by for any questions you have. Any applicant would have a short presentation. Before we go there, are there any pressing questions for staff? Shall we move to the applicant? Okay. Welcome. Good evening. Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to present. Members of the Commission appreciate a chance to introduce our team and just to give a follow-up to a very thorough presentation made by Fred. I will try to be very efficient because Fred covered a lot, which I was going to cover. This evening, I'm joined by the applicant, John Regan, who is going to be running the PowerPoint for me and providing input on an as-needed basis with Christopher Companies.

Ken Dondaro with the Tetra Corp is here with our team. Tom King, very important member of our team. He is the architect with Devereaux and Associates. And then Dan Van Pelt on short notice. Thank you, Dan, for showing up with Grove Slate. So in case you have any transportation questions, Dan is here to answer those as well. Let's go to the next slide, please. Just real briefly, obviously, this gives you just kind of a context of our site in relationship to Judicial Center across the street. And then adjacent to us is the Davies property, which was approved not that long ago. And we've done a fair amount of coordination with that applicant on that property since we interface with them. We thought it was important, obviously, to make sure that our site works with Davies or without Davies.

It is a question mark of who's going first. Next slide, please. So we were last in front of the commission where we presented an application for an assemblage of parcels, of all the parcels that are on the screen, except for parcel 4117, which is on the bottom. And that particular parcel was identified by this group as well as by others to be considered to be added to our project. John and his team spent a fair amount of time negotiating with that property owner. And fortunately, they came to terms and we were able to add it to our application. And so it's probably one of the major differences between what you had previously seen and now. I think what's also important, which I really want to point out, is because we hear so much about heights with regard to the application,

is one of the challenges is the vertical elevation difference between Cambridge Road and University. And as pointed out on the top right corner, it's about 26 vertical feet elevation change. So we need to figure that out. Tom's done a splendid job of working the building so that everything works. And I just wanted, again, to point that out as we proceed in the discussion. Next slide. This is a slide that Fred did a great job of explaining. I'm not going to dive back into here. He's already shared with you the intensity associated with the proposed development, the density of units, and so on and so forth. The one thing I will share with you, though, is our application was at 395 units previously.

We ended up, for reasons associated with height, reduced that to 392. I'll explain that shortly. Next slide. Next slide. So I've put this slide in a couple of different presentations. And when I look at it, I keep telling myself I need to go to the optometrist because I can't read it. You can read it when it's on a 24 by 36. So finally I got smart, and we went to the next slide. Okay, so let's go one back. Yeah, let's go to that one first. This is the cross-section of the building that shows its height as it relates to Chain Bridge Road. And so we wanted to make sure that we really looked at this carefully in terms of what the proposal is along that side of the roadway. And as pointed out by Fred, we are six stories.

And that six stories reaches a roof deck elevation of 516.6. And I share that because when you look at Davies, the roof elevation on Davies application is 512.6. And we kind of discovered that kind of accidentally, and I thought, well, you know what? There's a four-foot vertical change between our site and their site. So when you're kind of comparing ultimately in your mind because you can't obviously see it now, there's only going to be about a four-foot elevation delta. We're a tad higher, but I thought that that was important to recognize. And then also, in fairness and full disclosure, the top of the highest structure that's out there today, on top of the penthouse, elevation is 507.4. So we're about nine vertical feet higher in our ultimate development.

Okay, let's go to the university drive side. Next slide, please. Do you want to do this one? That's it. Thank you. Okay, so we'll study this one a little bit more. Again, the top elevation at the six-story portion. John, you want to just – nope, nope. Go back to the cross-section if you would. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, that's my fault. So if you see where the text building C is, right where John's identifying, to the left, at the very top there, that's – go keep going to the left, right at the top of the highest part of our building. And that matches the elevation that is on the Cambridge roadside. So then we've gone through several iterations about how do we soften this side as we draw closer to university drive.

Obviously, we need to get down to four stories. Tom and his team and John, through his leadership and guidance, worked several different iterations. And I will tell you that the building proposal was a little bit different early on in our process when we had initially submitted. We did have a unit – and, John, if you want to point out where we had the additional unit underneath the text building C. That used to be a unit right there where John's pointing now. And through, again, good comments from staff and through the creativity of our team, we were able to make modifications such that the building drops down to five stories in the area that John's pointing out. Now, as you get closer to Chain Bridge Road, it drops down to a four-story building with a fitness facility over top.

I'll bring up an elevation here shortly. But I think that what's important – and we'll work real closely with staff because this is still a question that we need to make sure that staff and the applicant team are on the same page – is how does that building reduce or step down and what is the dimensions that it steps down in. And so one of the things I want to clearly identify on this slide is if you look at the building face as it relates to University Drive, and then you look at the distance from that point over to where we have the six-story, it's 60 feet. You want to point that out, John? I'm sorry. That is not my one. Right there. Thank you. Okay. So that's 60 feet to the building face.

I think what's also important, and I think when I do this application again, how much farther is it to the face of curb that's associated with University Drive? The building kind of sits not parallel to University Drive, but on kind of a skewed-type condition. So the distance from the curb face to the building face at its closest point is about 20 feet. And at its furthest point, kind of closer to the Davies side, it's 55 feet. So on average, we are roughly 35 feet from the face of curb to the building face, another 60 feet to the point where you get to the six-story. So we're approximately almost 100 feet from the face of curb to where the six-story portion of the building starts. You're going to be able to see that a little bit more clearly now on the next slide.

John, if you want to go to that one, please. Ben, it is. Yep. Thank you. So this is an updated illustrative. We had the benefit or the opportunity to provide an updated rendering. Fred did not have this available to him, so his rendering was from what we previously submitted. This is kind of the latest, if you will, and this is what we're going to be presenting to the BAR. This is a view taken from university, looking back at our building, and you're looking at the four-story section right behind that. John, if you just want to point out where the fitness center is. That fitness center is on top of the residential units. It's stepped back slightly, and then behind that fitness center, again, is where you start getting into the residential units.

But wanted to, again, make sure that folks kind of can look at it from an elevation standpoint. And then the next two slides just kind of take you in a kind of a counterclockwise manner in terms of just showing you what that looks like. And one of the things that we owe credit to the Breckenridge community is they gave us really very insightful feedback as we went through a meeting with them. One of the things that they were strongly communicating to us is that they really wanted the building to look more residential. We still need to meet with them after we meet with the BAR again. But nonetheless, this is an update to what we had previously submitted where we've tried to incorporate some more residential components to try to help address some of the concerns raised by Breckenridge.

All right. In this view, again, this is on the other side of University Drive, just kind of looking back and looking at how that building works in terms of its step back. Since we're looking at building elevations, I will just bring you to the front of the site on Chainbridge Road. And those are similar to what you've already seen from Fred's presentation. I won't spend much time there, but that's how the building looks based on the latest submission for purposes of the BAR. All right. My presentation is mainly focused on the issues that were identified as outstanding. So we're going to switch over to the Greenway. Not that there was that much of an issue raised by staff. But nonetheless, I think it's clear just that folks understand with regard to staff's request that we really try to incorporate a little bit more in terms of furnishings and things of that nature to make this an inviting place.

We're really excited about what we're bringing forth when it comes to the Greenway. Some of the illustratives that we'll show you shortly kind of zoom in and show this a little bit better than this does. But while I have this slide up, what I wanted to provide is just a comparison. Our application, when you take a look at the area that's associated with the Greenway, just the Greenway itself is approximately 23,000 square feet in size. There are other areas that are located outside the Greenway, which are about 9,100 to 9,200 square feet in size, or a total of about 32,000 square feet. The reason I put that out there is that when I compare it to what Davies has with regard to their Greenway, they're about 9,000 square feet.

So 9,100 or so. So it just kind of gives you a comparison to understand the amount of open space associated with this development versus the Davies. The next slide shows you a little bit more character images. One of the things, and it's really kind of hard to see, but on the bottom left side, element number four or character image number four, shows you a kind of a seating condition that we're going to have throughout the Greenway. And, again, I think this was something that staff had pointed out that they suggested that we provide a little bit more of. And we heard them, and we're going to do that. And so we'll work with staff to better point that out as we follow up with them as we continue in the process.

The next two slides, I'm really pretty excited about how the Greenway looks. This is looking north, and it's kind of hard to see, but if you look at the perspective arrows on the bottom right corner, you can kind of see the angle in terms of what we're looking at. But this starts to show you how vibrant this is going to be. And it shows you the view of not only the Greenway, which is on the right side of the page, but also kind of our plaza area, if you will, where we're going to have outdoor seating for a really nice restaurant that's going to be in the bottom floor of the building. The next slide is a slide that we recently made changes to. Again, consistent with recommendations from staff.

They suggest to get more seating in that Greenway. If you note, that fountain now has seating. If you looked at an earlier picture, we did not have seating there. So it's going to be a neat place. This view is, again, taken from the other side. Looking back, it gives you, again, feel and flavor for the Greenway, and we're really excited about it. Moving on with regard to some outstanding conditions. Again, we'll work closely with Fred and his team. We'll work closely with the identification that there were some inconsistencies between the GDP and the architectural materials. We hope that we've cleaned that up with our most recent BAR submission. However, we'll continue to work closely and make sure our staff is satisfied with both documents.

Staff has identified that the density needed to be recalculated to take out the proposed right-of-way for the roadways, and we've done that. So we'll get with staff and show them the math on this, but the density went from 101.3 when you take out the area associated with the proposed right-of-way. We go to 103.8, slight change. It's about the same density numbers as what you saw previously in the Davies application. Lot coverage, it turns out the lot coverage mathematically works out to be about the same because you take out imperviousness when you take out the right-of-way. You also reduce the area. So the math is such that the lot coverage is still 85.3. And then with regard to building coverage, our building coverage did go up slightly from 54.3 to 55.6.

Moving on, staff had an excellent comment with regard to turning movements. We'll work closely with staff to make sure that we've demonstrated that the turning movements work. And, again, that will be an exercise that will get resolved with staff. Next comment talks about pedestrian connections. This slide represents, in blue, the pedestrian connections proposed with this application. We've tried to maximize that. At the same time, we tried to balance it with proposed landscaping. So as what was pointed out by Fred in the presentation, we are asking for a waiver of the sidewalk along the north side of our proposed private roadway as it interfaces with what I call the holdout parcel. We did try to get that parcel in our assemblage, but, unfortunately, they were not interested.

So if and when they develop, we've got easements in place for them to provide connections both to the greenway as well as to our private roadway. And, again, that was something that we kind of worked out with staff. But, nonetheless, we are proposing to put trees in there so that, again, try to achieve a little bit of a balance between the landscaping aspect of it as well as the pedestrian connectivity. And I think that with regard to the sidewalk on Davies, there was a discussion with some members in the citizens' community that perhaps we'd look at doing a sidewalk just north of the roadway that Davies is going to build. We really went back and forth on that as a team, and we felt that because we really didn't have any connection points along that side of the building that really functioned as a primary connection point other than the bottom right-hand corner where we are building a sidewalk.

And, John, if you point that out, please. And then Davies, they're building a sidewalk where their building is, where they have all their entrances. We felt like, you know what, from a balance standpoint, landscaping seemed to make more sense there. So we'll still work with staff, but that was kind of our thought process. Next slide, John, coming to an end. We'll continue to work with staff to solve, make sure they're comfortable with our proposed site distance analyses. Sanitary sewer. This was a comment raised by folks in DPW with regard to utility capacity associated with the sanitary sewer system that we're tying into. Per their request, we've done a comprehensive detailed analysis to model really what the capacity of that sewer system is.

And what we have found is that there is a sewer pipe that the city is requesting that we replace. We have found that that sewer is only at 80% capacity at ultimate build-out. When I say ultimate build-out, that's just not for our proposed building. But when the adjacent building, the hold-out property that I pointed out to you, as well as another building across the street, develop in their ultimate state, there's still 20% capacity left in that pipe. So we've communicated that back to staff. I think they're still pushing for the pipe. But nonetheless, we felt like that was important to put out there. And we'll continue to work with staff on that matter. And then lastly, just to let folks know here on the commission, we did go through a community outreach process.

We sent out invitations to Breckenridge, Chancery Square, Courthouse Square, Crestmont, and Mayfair. And interestingly, only Breckenridge responded. So we definitely engaged with them, actually in this room, and had a very productive discussion with them. We will be meeting with their HOA board here after we meet with the BAR as well. But we did meet with them in March, at the end of March. And then we had a separate meeting not that long ago with the Fairfax Citizens and Smarter Growth Committee. Had a very productive session with them. Showed them a lot of the same slides that I shared with you. So with that, that concludes my presentation. I'm very grateful again for the time. And we are here to answer any questions that you may have.

Thank you very much. Commissioners, questions, comments? Mr. McCarthy. Hey, thank you. I wanted to talk about the transportation study. And I have one specific question. It applied to the 15% TDM and mode split, and then I think 10% internal capture reduction. Being a resident here, the traffic is a problem, and the parking's always been a problem. So I just wanted to see, you know, what empirical evidence, if any, you use to come to that. Because, you know, if you cut those down by half, what kind of implications would they have? So thank you. Good evening. So I'm Dan Van Pelt with Grove Slade. Nice to be here with you this evening. So I think when we started our transportation study, one of the things we do is we go through and we work with staff

and we look at what those assumptions want to be in terms of the modal split reductions. And I think given the support of the site with the transportation in terms of the metro and different bus access, 15% is kind of actually still a pretty conservative assumption from the standpoint of what the data tells us. We probably would expect it actually in reality probably be a little bit lower, a little bit higher than that in terms of the non-auto trips. Traffic engineers, we have a tendency to be pretty conservative. So we usually err towards vehicular trips over transit trips. And then the 10% is really just to account for the synergies that happen of the uses on the site. We always expect when you have a mixed-use site that there's going to be some level of that sort of synergy that's going to reduce trips

and then there's going to be that capture internal to the site. So 10% is actually, again, kind of a conservative low number. But that's what we assumed analysis because we know there's going to be some level of that. So hopefully that helped answer your question. Yes, it does. And can I ask, did you stress test it at all to see where it no longer worked? Well, I can tell you one of the things that we don't do very often is go back and look at our assumptions in terms of what the trip generation is. We don't do a lot of the after-fact study. But when we do monitor, what we usually find is what I just explained to you earlier, is it's usually we've been too conservative on the vehicular side.

And what we don't want to do is that we're trying to think about how do we right-size the transportation network is that if we're too conservative on the vehicular side, then we over-design for vehicles. And that sometimes can come at the detriment to our pedestrians and our bus cyclists and our bus users. So we're trying to strike a right balance there. But usually we find that, if anything, we have overestimated vehicular trips still. Thank you. And I have one more. I don't know if it's for you, but just in general transportation. In one of the drawings I saw, it looked like there was a loading area on Building C, right? How do you intend to service Building A from a trash truck? You know, where are they going?

Because I don't see a ton of space for that. Either you or Tom can take it on with it. There's been a lot of analysis with regard to that, and it's changed a few times. And so I'm going to go ahead and let Tom King, our architect, address that question. Thank you. So because the garage extends under all three buildings continuously, there's a trash chute and a trash room underneath each building in the lower garage level. The trash will be deposited into containers in each of those trash rooms. Then they'll be transported to, there's a trash pickup area that's designated on Building C next to where the trash truck pulls in. And so the full containers would be set in that room. And then when the trash men come, they wheel them out, load them.

And there are obviously extra trash containers, so they're just replacing them under the building. And they move them through. I think to expand on that, when we talked about this design, we really didn't want to have restaurant debris or trash to be brought across that whole entire plaza area. So we wanted to go downstairs and get out through the garage. Okay. So I think that's a great answer. And then if I recall, there's residential above A2? Correct. So is there any, are you just going to mark off some spaces for move-ins? How, will they, will they do the same caravan underneath into a freight elevator? Yes. I mean, there's a loading area, a surface loading area with three spaces between B and C.

Right here. Oh, no. There you, up north a little bit, John. Right near the Greenway? Yes. Adjacent to the Greenway, correct. Yeah. So it's centrally located to be able to load to all three buildings. Okay. That's fine. Thank you. Mm-hmm. Thanks, John. Others? Should we keep going on traffic? Yeah, please. While we, I have a few questions. So my first one's about University Drive, which is where I live. And specifically, I live on the north side, you know, north of Old Town. And I've got some concerns about this east-west private road dumping a lot of traffic onto University, which, you know, per the small area plan is supposed to be residential, low volume, low speed, bike friendly. I can tell you it's none of those things right now.

And I think this is going to exacerbate that problem. Because University, I think, as I'm reading it, is full access. So you can go left or right. Whereas Chain Bridge is right in, right out. That's correct. So for the people coming home at night off of 66, they're not going to want to go straight on to 123 because it's a nightmare if you've ever gone that way. So you turn left on Fairfax Boulevard, go down University Drive. And then likewise, as you're going north, it seems like this opens up the opportunity to cut through this private road. So I guess, did you look specifically at University Drive and the impacts that this road is going to have on that traffic? We certainly did. I mean, I think our study area included intersections on University Drive along with Chain Bridge Road.

And we looked at those volumes. I think one of the things that we need to think about here is that we have existing productive uses on the site today. They're office uses, but they're generating trips today. In the future with the residential, we're going to have a very similar number of trips. Now, the pattern is going to change a little bit, right? So it's different. The commuting pattern is a little different. It's coming home versus going to work and vice versa. But what we did is we looked at how that traffic currently loads the network. We took it off that's currently coming in out of the site. And then we looked at, with the new uses on the site, how will that use the right in, right out?

How will that use the full access on University? And actually what we found is that the delta and the trips, it really didn't show any significant real change in the way the intersections would operate. So I think that has really to do that there is traffic on the network already from the site today that is going to go away. Again, patterns change slightly, but it's still there's volume on the roadway network today that's using the capacity of the roadway network. And we're in some ways just replacing that with new development. But I guess my question is on allocation. I think a lot of those entry points right now are off of Chainbridge. And this is going to reallocate a lot of that to university.

Yeah, I think that – And university is specifically designed in the small area plan to be low traffic residential, whereas 123 is the main north-south artery. So I think it's got a different profile. I'm just curious. What is going to be the impact on university, I guess, just to put it bluntly? Yeah, and I think that – I think it's a great question to understand that. I think what we – again, what we found, and I think the majority – the number of trips is biased towards university because of the way the access works. Yeah. I think the other question that I'd say – reiterate. 4117, the BB&T building, has access on 123. I think by putting our road in, it now gives the ability to be more – get more people to use 123, the way our design is being designed to do.

So it will relieve – right now, those four buildings are using that – the university drive parking lot more than really 123. So now, if you're going to go to work and, as you said, going home but leaving to go to work, you're going to get on 123. Right. So you're going to at least have more – let's say morning traffic is going to start going on 123. I got it. And then just more broadly beyond university, how is the South Street extension factored into this? Is this all modeled off of that? Because there's going to be a new light there, right, which will – like, if I'm sitting at that light going north, I imagine with traffic we have, the queues are going to back up to this east-west private drive.

Like, how does that get factored into your traffic study? So when we scoped the transportation study, what was communicated to us is I think we're looking at 2031 is about when the South Street extension is supposed to go in. The build year that is assumed for this project is 2029. So we do not have the South Street extension in our transportation modeling because we don't believe that it's going to be in place. Certainly when that – later when that comes online, that would be a way to relieve traffic and create more connectivity in the area. But we do not have that modeled in our build horizon for this project. Okay. Thank you. Those are all my traffic questions. Do you get any other questions, Steve?

I do. Yeah, I got a lot of questions. We're not limited to a particular topic. All right. All right. Maybe we just stay on that road for a second. All right. The east-west. And let me pull up my notes. I'm just trying to figure out, like, conceptually, what is it supposed to be? Because, you know, from how you've oriented the garage and the retail and the loading and all that stuff, it feels like a main street. But it's been drawn as almost like just a fire lane with the minimum, you know, 26-foot wide. And, again, I mentioned that now it presents a cut-through opportunity between University and Chainbridge, which I think is different from Davies, where both sides were right in, right out. So what is that street supposed to be?

Is it a main street serving those buildings? And if so, should it be designed that way as opposed to an alley? And, you know, it's a lead into the sidewalk question and stuff like that. Well, we certainly designed it as our main street. This is our access in terms of being able to bring people from Chainbridge to university or vice versa and to bring them into the development. There is an access directly off of university, and, John, you can point that out, which gets into the lower level of our garage. But we want to be able to have the opportunity for, obviously, loading trucks to get to the central portion of our site, which is where those four spaces are, John, if you want to point – or three spaces, if you want to point those out again, are loading.

And then one of the things that we really feel strongly about is to – we want, obviously, everybody wants the – should the application be approved, for this to be a successful project, for that restaurant to stay in place, for that office building to be full of people, for there to be an opportunity if there's an Amazon driver coming by and he needs to drop something off. We've got the front plaza area there that's set up to have some parking spaces, although, obviously, the predominant – overwhelming majority is in our garages. But we wanted some accessibility there directly adjacent to our retail area. And that is something which, again, was kind of a balance. Obviously, we need to have pedestrian access.

We've done that, certainly, with the Greenway. But we need to be able to connect Cambridge to university. And, you know, that's something which we talked quite a bit about as we went through the earlier processes in terms of coordination efforts and so forth, you know, with town officials – with city officials, that is – to, you know, bring forth an application that's going to meet the comp plan requirements, that's going to be able to function, that's going to be able to allow this development to be sustaining and to be vibrant. And so we had to strike that balance. And we made sure that the roadway width was wide enough in order to accommodate that type of profile that I just described to you.

So that's kind of a, you know, a quick description of how we came about with regards to the layout. But it was important, again, to have connectivity between Chainbridge Road and University Drive. And the fire marshal felt strongly about that, too. So maybe you can educate me on that. Because when I look at the small area plan, this driveway doesn't exist. The greenway seems to go north-south through this entire parcel down to where the shared road is with the Davies property. So I guess was this something that the city requested be added, or was this a design that you guys came up with? Well, again, we tried to be smart from the very beginning, if you want to call it that, in terms of just trying to solicit as much feedback as we could,

certainly from the city, from transportation experts, what makes sense in terms of architecture for the building, what makes sense for the viability of the proposed development. Fire marshal was important that we had connectivity between Chainbridge Road and University Drive. And so collectively, for all those reasons, and the site just works better when you have connectivity. Obviously, there's a requirement when it talks about making connections to abutting properties, to non-residential properties. Well, we're providing connectivity between Chainbridge and between universities. So that was something which I think is in line with the spirit of the connectivity provisions within the ordinance.

And so for all those reasons, it's the reason why we came up with the layout that we did. If I might interject, these office buildings were, in the small area plan, were just expected to remain as they are. Right. And the reason we're seeing this now is because we have a redevelopment proposal. I know. It's just it seems the greenway is the main focus of this, and this breaks it up. You know, now I'm crossing two crosswalks just to walk the greenway. Makes it feel less like a greenway. Not to mention I've got a loading dock right next to it and an auto park right next to it. So, you know, like the balance with the pedestrian and the traffic, not to mention this is labeled as an alley. I think there's a sign that says no cut through.

So the connectivity is just for the residents. Like this would not be designed as a street that public should be passing down, correct? You said that we labeled it as an alley? Yeah. I think that's what the proffer calls it. Okay. Well, the idea is that there would be a public ingress egress easement on that. Okay. So alley perhaps is not the right term if that's the way we reference it. Well, that's why I was getting confused as to what is it, you know, supposed to be. It's a private road. Or is it an actual street? It's a private road. Okay. Yeah. So maybe just take a look at that. Okay. And if there's improvements that could be made on width and sidewalks. But I'll yield the floor to my colleagues because I've taken up too much time.

No worries. Thank you. Mr. Rice. Good. Excellent questions from my colleague. And I think when we hear those questions, it raises new questions from us. I think if anyone from your team was present during discussion about the Davies proposal, it should be relatively clear that we were not altogether happy with several elements of that proposal. The one thing that was frustrating to no end was their initial presentation where they presented the Greenway as essentially a convenient place to pull their dumpsters from this storage that was right along the Greenway through to their street so they could be picked up. So they were thinking of the Greenway as having a function related to their trash and their recycling.

And that absolutely misses the entire purpose of the Greenway. And so the extent to which the functionalities of, you know, loading, unloading, and so forth, you know, either adjacent to the Greenway or, you know, pertinent to the buildings and their function, those things need to be separated a bit. The entire small area plan for this area does feature that Greenway. Its intention is to pull people out of their cars, activate the neighborhood, present a place for people to walk, for people to interact, and to congregate in certain places. Totally agree. 100%. Yeah. Your treatment of the Greenway in terms of a fountain and places to sit is light years ahead of where we started with the Davies proposal.

I am happy to see an effort made in that regard. I want to echo the comments of the Smart Growth review of this and suggest the four parking spaces in the lot adjacent to the fountain be removed to create additional open space and places for the public to congregate. You would still have 10 spaces remaining in that lot. There's additional parking underneath. I think adding additional green space would be very helpful, especially with the lack of street trees along that interior roadway. Having those roadways at the absolute functional minimum is problematic. I do know from discussions with the fire marshal and folks in the fire department that it's very common for them to encounter that delivery driver stopping on the roadway for convenience.

You do have the three loading spaces off the road adjacent to Building B. That's fine. That's a great idea. But people are going to stop their vehicles in the roadway. They're going to park there. And having a roadway that's already so narrow that you can accommodate the foam engine, the ladder truck, you know, EMS, you're not going to be able to accommodate those vehicles coming through and responding to an emergency when you have drivers on the roadway. I don't expect you at this point to be thinking of how to police parking along your interior private road, but having it that narrow does create a problem. I want to just maybe shift a little bit. There may be a response to some of the things I've mentioned, but the sidewalk on the south side,

this is something that we envisioned. And it's terribly unfair for us to have a proposal approved that places contingencies on a developer next door and just expecting them to, you know, to fix the problem created by a development that was approved. And I'm sorry. We tried to push as hard as we could to get the roadway on the south side and Davies property to have a better width and sidewalks. And a sidewalk does need to be placed there. And I know that several people have commented on this on the very south side. On this side, yes. Yes. Yeah. So all the renderings look great, but the buildings are pushed right up, basically as close as they can get to the edge. The road is on the property boundary.

Yeah. So I realize this is a problem caused by approval of a prior project. It does seem difficult that we'll have perhaps four or five different east-west corridors through the very center of this area. And my colleagues already pointed out this sort of renderings in the small area plan show a nice greenway through the center. But what we really have is three or four segments of kind of very short greenways connected by larger stretches through parking lots. And that's a shame. And that's a shame. Originally, when this was presented as part of a small area plan, the greenway specifically, it was the sort of feature of this part, the place that would kind of activate public life, that would bring kind of residents and shoppers and people walking up to Main Street out of their cars and into the city.

Is there anything that you think could be done additionally with the plan here to increase the benefit and use of the greenway? Will there be a raised crosswalk, for instance, connecting the two halves of the greenway through the private street? We've explored how this area may look with regards to some refinements along the lines that you described with regard to the four spaces. Is that that's been a comment that we've gotten from multiple parties? That happens to be the widest area presently associated with our green space, which is probably 45 to 55 feet wide. But nonetheless, I think that's an area that we can go back and revisit in terms and see what we might be able to do to react to those comments with regards, again,

to that portion of the greenway. Certainly the raised crosswalk, that's something we could easily accommodate. And we did anticipate that there was going to be a crosswalk in that area. How that might ultimately look in terms of its final design, I think the raised crosswalk suggestion is a good one, and we can explore that. There are some places on campus at Mason that have, for an organization without any planning oversight, and with one person who's half of their job is planning, they do have some good pedestrian crossing areas. And I think that's more because of the legal liability of not having them. But the raised crosswalk between Merton Hall on the north side of campus and the rest of that central campus is quite good.

It's differentially colored, it's raised, and instinctively drivers slow down for it. And then when people just step off the sidewalk, they're already prepared to stop. For a campus with a lot of pedestrian problems, it's quite a good example, and I'd recommend that. The city has several different designs that CDP staff could talk to about. I think when we were designing this, like we had one time coming off Chambridge Road, we had a fountain that was in the, like, between building A and B. And they're like, eh, I don't think that's going to work. They, city staff asked us to go down and look at Crystal City, you know, where Amazon's, you know, new campuses, and look at some of the things they're doing down there in terms of activating.

We went to a plaza that was just all literally stone. You could literally move a planter, and it could be a parking lot if you wanted it to be. There was a lot, you know, just to have grass doesn't mean it's going to be activated. We really designed this to be outside of this retail, outside of the restaurant. We're planning this to be a restaurant. This we want to be very active for people to be in there. The reason why, just to give you an understanding why we left those four parking spaces there, because we've seen, like, the Green Turtle, a lot of stuff that's going into retail stuff, easy access to retail areas somewhat help to keep, you know, the viability. And this is very, we're trying to make this very, very active, even though this is a, this is,

at one time the fountain was actually in the middle of this area right in here. We actually moved it to here. And here. We also had it, yeah, we had it here, and we had it here. So we've had it in two different locations. So we are trying to make it very active. We don't want it to be, I mean, there's places, if you've ever been in Georgetown, they have the little, you know, C&O Canal, there's a lot of greenways going down through that area, and it's between older buildings and stuff like that. So we're very, we do want this to be a very vibrant area where people can hang out. I mean, that's what this whole, this whole, that whole area is planned for. And I think one of the last thing, and I think this is obvious,

but one of the challenges, obviously, is when you're looking at the comp plan as a whole, it's a lot easier to plan it out. When you're looking at development on a segmented type basis, it adds a wrinkle that gets more challenging. And so you see these applications as they come in, when you're having to deal with development for a finite number of parcels, which is quite a bit less than what was envisioned in the comprehensive plan. And you try to keep an eye on the ultimate, but at the same time you need to make it work with what's around you. And so we're taking that into consideration, trying to deal with that as best we can. Right. I think that Breckenridge letter that, you know, looking at this entire thing that was sent widely expresses the frustration that you're perhaps alluding to,

that it's very difficult to figure out what parts of the small area plan we're choosing to ignore to allow a developer to come in and do something, and which parts are real. And so it's difficult for us to have started with a proposal that fell short in a few areas. And in my, obviously, my main focus here is this greenway through the center. We didn't enforce the kind of grading of the greenway through the Davies parcel to really create a functional passageway all the way through. So I don't want you to be burdened with any deficits of any other developers, but I do want this to be the very best that it can be. And I think feedback from Breckenridge is quite good. The feedback from the small growth, smart growth group is excellent.

Having very thoughtful feedback from city residents like this is solid gold. And I would take that very seriously because we all read it. Sure. And we take it seriously. To get a little more specific, and my colleague to my right mentioned the traffic issues on the university and the problems there, I'm real concerned about the left-turning traffic northbound. Left-turning traffic into the development. People coming from Mason, students renting that are coming in that direction. And I'm worried that having that center turning lane, which doesn't have a huge length, there's only so many cars that can stack to do a left turn during the 4 to 7 p.m. hour. I'm concerned that that will be a pinch point and will cause problems.

I certainly would not want to see university be redesigned and lose the bike lanes to provide additional turning space. So in terms of that left turn into the private street and also into the entrance on university, how will those left-turning cars be managed? And you'll have additional traffic out of Breckenridge that will be sort of competing with that. I know the level of service for the Breckenridge intersection is marked at B right now. I'm skeptical a little bit of the problems on the university because, as my colleague did mention, it's not intended to be the central thoroughfare through the city. Yeah, I mean, the traffic coming out of the site will be stopped controlled. So traffic on university will not be stopped controlled.

So it'll be able to left turn will make it a left one that has a gap in the southbound traffic. What we're seeing in the capacity analysis is telling us that there really does not appear to be an issue for that left turn. But I guess, could you help me with that? Yeah, simply the cars that are coming southbound on university, at the end of the day, any left turns off university are pausing and yielding for cars. And the ability to turn left through traffic without signalization is going to be quite difficult. And you're going to have cars stacking in that center lane. That's going to create additional disruption for the lanes on either side. And certainly it's going to make it very challenging for cyclists who are trying to use the roadway as well.

But if you're talking about George Mason University, yes, I know when you come out of the campus, going straight ahead is a lot easier. But if you took the right and then took a right on 123, that's a right in to our site. So if you're coming from George Mason, after you're about the third week of living there, you'd probably go, okay, I'm going to come up 123 and take a right in. And it's not just Mason. It's, you know, the residents. No, no, but I mean, you're just saying. There's thousands of residents living on the south edge of the city. Oh, absolutely. Which includes me. So I'm concerned about that. And I think the Breckenridge folks are also concerned about traffic on the university. My colleagues mentioned his, you know, questions about that.

And I think at least studying that in detail and having great answers for those might be quite useful. I'm going to leave it there. I'm not going to go to stormwater and sewer. I know those are covered and that you've provided an answer for those as well. We do need to make sure that we have ample capacity for what we're doing in the city. And being at 80%, it sounds like, well, shoot, we've got another 20%. That actually sounds like a difficult situation. If we're at 80% capacity, that's potentially problematic. But I'll leave additional questions for my colleagues. Thank you. Ms. Lockhart. Thank you, Chair Feather. So I'd like to go in a slightly different direction about layout of retail and commercial and utilization.

Are these intended to be single parcel or single lease facilities as drawn, or is it just sort of labeled blankly office and commercial and could be subdivided? It could be. I mean, any of the areas in red here. Because it looks like two retail, one office. We'll put demisey walls in depending on what we're renting it to. I mean, I know at one time there was a Bales bondsman that was in the building. Currently, one of the buildings has the public defender's office in it. One of the buildings has CASA in it. So we're hoping that they come back. They'll have to move out while we're building it. We want them to move back in. So you're good. You've got the second part of my question, which was, could you speak to the current configuration, classification, and utilization of that office space?

As you pointed out, it seems like perhaps not the most tenants that are most rolling in dough for upgraded office space. If the intent is to come back with class A office space, that probably is not a match to the current tenants for this space. Would that be correct? I would say that there would be a slight rent increase, yes. I would say the buildings right now would be classified probably B minus of C plus. Sure. At best. At best. Yeah. So they're currently renting, I think some of them are at $25 a foot. So they would definitely be in that category. So I would say that there would be an increase of rent. Sure. So even putting aside sort of the state of them, because I'm sure they could all require an upgrade,

I do feel like Fairfax City has a preponderance of small office space, and that's actually a selling point on renting in the city is people who are looking for those more manageable places without sort of renting a shingle in Tyson's Corner. Do you feel like this configuration can support that, or would your preference be for larger tenants? Currently, all four of those buildings are handling small law firms and land or title companies, and I would want that to be the same place. We're not looking to, hey, whole entire building for rent. It is for the people who live there. Okay. Was ownership of units ever considered, or did you all go straight to rental apartments? Like was a condo model ever considered?

Condos in this day and age, the size of this project would not be conducive to being able to be bankable or even financed. Okay. Given that, maybe this is a question for Mr. Harden, we haven't seen any movement on the Davies property in almost a year. So are projects at this scale in this location economically viable in real lengths of time? I don't know. I'm not running their project. Sure. But, I mean, we're planning on, if this gets approved, to move forward as a, we do have a lender, and we do have an investor that will be able to fund this project. Okay. And then in terms of going back to the Breckenridge letter and sort of the upcoming meeting with the Board of Architectural Review, is there a narrative that you're planning to propose there that you can share with us in terms of design choices or,

because I look at this and I don't necessarily see Fairfax City on the facade. I know you mentioned adding more residential elements, which is appreciated. But in terms of sort of what was asked for by the neighborhood feedback, do you feel like you can speak to that adequately? Probably should let the architect respond to that. Obviously, when we met with Breckenridge, the theme from them on the university side was they definitely wanted a residential look or element associated with that. So, um, the, the, the, the, the BAR submission, uh, attempts to respond to that particular comment. With regard to, um, Chambers Road, um, I mean, the, the feedback that we got from, um, the Fairfax City Citizens for Smarter Growth was, was pretty positive.

Um, So, with regard to, um, the theme, I think is the word you used, I'm not the right guy for that, so I'll let Tom. I think, I think one of the things, I think one of the things, I'll let Tom talk about it, but one of the things that I really drove, the original drawings that were done, if you look at our original submissions to what it is today, you know, I wanted, let's say, my, you know, great-grandchildren, if you drove by, go, hey, my grandfather designed that building. So, this, and we're designing this for, you know, 50 years from now, and we're not, yes, it should be softer when it's down near, you know, on university, because it's against townhouses, but this is, the, the, the Chamber Ridge Road side of it,

is across the street from the judicial center. So, if you're going to make it look like the school across the street, the old schoolhouse, then I, I can put, I mean, it's, it, you're trying to give it a little bit of a modern look, give it, you know, try to match up with the, what the judicial center's doing, but make it a statement. This should be a statement building for the city of Fairfax, not just, you know, you know, a museum, and that's what we're trying to do there. I mean, the judicial center's the county, we don't claim that one, so. We got, we got, we got rid of, we got rid of the Massey building. Let's, let's get to the, go for the positive stuff. I think it fell down on its own,

didn't it? After you. I mean, I don't have too much more to add. We, we started with John's direction. He, you know, he, he told us, he told us, I want you to be proud of the building. We, we want, we don't need to look at every building in the city and try and match it. We want, we want to attract retail. We want to attract the office. We want to, you know, we, we want a building that's going to stand out and be at the same time be inviting. Um, we, obviously we pulled in various elements for the elevations that are not typical for the city. Um, but we feel like they, they represent, uh, the, the ideal that John, was brought to us, uh, about what he was hoping to do. Um, I, I mean, I don't,

I don't really have a whole lot more to add. We, it was a creative process. We, this is maybe the six, seven, there were quite a few. Um, um, and, um, and, uh, I feel like the, the renderings really, really solidified it for us. Um, we, we had renderings of, of other iterations again, that, it, it wasn't portraying the, the, the retail element and the residential piece above. Um, and, and we do feel like that this is capturing that the ground is, is an active space. And we have, we have our gateways to invite people into the community. We're trying to, to activate the, the space within the three building, uh, assemblage. And that, that, that's kind of how we ended up where we were. And just,

just to reiterate that, like, for example, this, this is the, the retail or the, the, uh, the, uh, the restaurant. We really wanted to at night. We want that to, to really, when you have lights on and it's open, we want that to draw people in to, you know, they don't have to drive to, to, to, to it. They can walk to it. Um, you know, that's what we really want this building to be. You can walk across street to work work or walk down the street to work in, in the city. And we want you to live, you know, live, work, entertain in the same, on this complex. I'm good. Thank you. Mr. Cunningham. Thank you, Mr. Brother. I appreciate it. Uh, I will start by saying thank you very much for, for pursuing consolidation of the property between what you originally came in with and the Davies property.

I think that is a huge step forward. As I guess I had termed it the orphan property, if it were not going to be in left to its own devices in the future. So, I think that it expands what you're doing with this to make it much more usable and much more functional. I've got a number of comments, as I guess I usually do. One, we're talking traffic. And part of what I will observe on traffic is that, yes, we're getting much denser. And more traffic is going to be the problem going into the future. So, how do you regulate that? One of the other areas that is somewhat analogous to your cut through street that we dealt with a few years ago and generated a tremendous amount of conversation about cut through traffic.

You can't do that. Was termed the Moxley, or which is now 50 point. And the idea of expending Bevan Drive from Route 50 down to Route 29 was considered anathema. Because all that was going to be was cut through traffic through the middle of Camp Washington. And yet with the design that you've got at that particular location, as you bring it in from either the north or the south, you've got either direction turning in off of Route 50. You've got right in, right out off of Route 29. In the middle, you've got a bit of a serpentine road. You've got a roundabout. And then right on Route 29, you have the same function you have here, which is architecture over the roadway. And I think that tends to make it a tunnel that you're going through or that.

And I think that will cut down a lot of cut through traffic. Simply because people aren't comfortable cutting through that kind of a space. They don't know that it's going to save them time. And on a narrow road, it probably won't. So you don't have some of the serpentine, but I think that can be looked at. And that one feature, I think, is a major plus in cutting down cut through traffic. When South Street is extended through, it will perform perhaps much the same function that Sager Avenue does now. If you're slow on 123, you cut over on Sager to get to university and go. So that issue is already alive and well. And the question here is, how do you connect your development to both streets in a functional way

to let people get in and out? And the next question, I guess, I have in terms of traffic comes back to the discussion that I had or my concerns as expressed on Davies. When we look at Davies and where you get in and out of parking on Davies, what they have proposed is commercial on 123, right on the west side of the development. Where do you get to that if you're coming in to go to a restaurant or a shopping center or something along that line? You come off your university drive, you go in about two car lengths, and you turn under the building. Now you take a serpentine route under the building, changing a level in parking to get up to the west side of the entire building. Now how many, you know,

all of you young folks who love to do computer games may find that fun, but I think there are a lot of drivers out there who don't find navigating under buildings to be really that much fun, especially to find something along that line. If you live there, you learn how to do it. All the rats learn to run the maze, but if you're anything else, that becomes a challenge. And so when I look at the parking here, I believe you've got two entrances. One is off university to the lower level, and the other is off of the private street to the upper level. But both of those are very close to university drive, which means if I'm going to do anything in the restaurant or the commercial space or anything else

in building A, how is it laid out to make that maze easier to run for people to figure out how to get from point A to point B with underground parking through congested, heavily traveled area that has spaces allocated to various uses, that I would think would be something that really could use some extra information because it's going to help anybody who's going to have to use it. Right. And I grant you, it is a challenge. We have to take advantage of the grade, and where it's low is where we get into the garage. So that unfortunately puts us on the low side near university. Again, you make a good point, though, about why we're trying to keep the parking on the surface because a lot of that is going to be

quick trips. You know, hopefully the people are going to be stopping into the restaurant and they'll know if I go at 5 o'clock, there's plenty of parking on the surface, I'm good there. Because there are going to be people that aren't comfortable with going in the garage. Although, the garage is, it's not the circuitous route that Davies has. It is all on the upper level, but you do have to travel to the back corner of the garage to be able to access the elevator. Unfortunately, that's just the way it works out with being able to access the garage from the elevation that we need to be at. We don't have a garage layout, I don't believe, but yeah. Did you have one? You had it on your presentation.

I'm going to flip this out. There are creative wayfinding indicators that you can use as well to direct people. That's where Davies was at. We've had significant discussions in-house about wayfinding and that's something that we're going to be providing to make sure that these type of issues are being addressed. that's the upper right. That's the... Yeah, there we go. Yeah, there we go. That and getting in, I think that's an important thing to make as a point of how you're going to do the ease of that. that's the upper right. A question I have, you've got the surface parking on... in front of the building A and your number of spaces. I really appreciate what you've done with the greenway and opening it up

so that it could be used by people for the number of units we've got. I think you're going to have, probably have 700 people living there. and when you get to Davies, if they don't want to go and use their space, they're going to want to walk through the greenway and use this space. So I think that opens that up for use by residents and use by other people using the restaurants or that. Is there a thought or is it possible that at times you could close off that surface parking and open it up as additional amenity space if people had big parties or things along that line so that it becomes an option that makes it more viable to have parking up there because the space could be used for more than that

for special occasions. Good idea. Things that could be used along that line and that just makes that parking space more functional than saying, oh, it's reserved for all the pizza delivery guys or all the FedEx trucks or all the UPS drivers and is that centrally located for them to park and how do they get to the entrance of the buildings to make their deliveries from there? In other words, how much time do you tie up a driver if he's trying to wander around security routes to get to where he has to go and then come back to his vehicle? Is that central to get into the buildings and do that? Is that designed for ease of use for all of those service people that have to do it? It actually is very central

for the commercial portions, A and B, were there near the main entrances to both buildings. The C building is all residential and so its access, the lowest level, the bottom level of the garage would be residential only, gated with the access off a university. It would only be the commercial parking and those aren't designated on there. John, can you go to the next? Oops. Nope. There we go. And on the BAR set, on this one, it's not. But our garage, right, there are about 35 commercial spaces that are in the north, well, the upper left plan northwest corner that are in this area or the commercial. So it's basically a turn in, a turn right, and a turn right and your parking is there and the elevator

is right there to be able to access that. And we can put signage in the building itself. Most definitely. That's great. In my history, going around a long time, we used to go to places and shop and buy things and then bring them home. My wife has now learned about a place called Amazon. And all you do is get out the computer and one package delivered tomorrow. So a lot of that goes on. And I suspect that younger people find that much more convenient. So Amazon may be loading a truck to come in and throw off a bunch of packages at a time to make it efficient. But that means the Amazon guy has got to be able to get there and have some place to offload those packages for people to pick them up later.

Is that a function being designed in? It is, yeah. Actually, in the amenity area on building B, the blue area on the south building would have a package room that would collect packages for all of the three buildings for the residents. And a standard mail room or whatever for... Standard mail room and a package room. It'll be a big room. Yes, I... We've tried... We've tried all the locker storage things and everything and nobody uses them. They just pile the packages adjacent to it. It's frustrating, but... It is. Since the pandemic, I have to say, designing of a multifamily building for packages, we've done the Amazon package thing. Too small. They lay them on the floor. It's right now, we're designing them

with cubbies and it's... You're just basically... You can tell them it's in cubby one or whatever and it's just a bunch of, you know, shelves that people can put stuff on because it's just amazing how much on a multi... Especially on something this big, the package room is going to be almost as big as the amenity area. Okay. The next question I have, I guess, on amenities. I see this beautiful swimming pool in the middle of Building C. Yes. Is that going to be a year-round amenity or is that going to be like the one at Davies, the one at the Fairfax Swim Club where we use it in the summer and put it away and hope people don't fall into it during nine months of the year. I would like to say it's year-round,

but I don't think so. Yeah, it will be a seasonal use. I think one of the things when we're designing this, we'd love... We're going to try to do is on the top of the buildings is have outdoor areas that we can use on top of the building. Also on top of that where the exercise area is, that's actually going to be the top of that roof. We're thinking they're going to work out there or do something there and actually be on that outside back deck of University Drive. So we want a lot of outdoor space that we want to activate on top of these buildings. Okay. I don't know how much real utility the pool is. I know there was a suggestion again with the Moxley at the start and it went away. Have you ever thought

of a rooftop restaurant or something along that line as an amenity that you could put up there that people could use? Don't encourage me. Okay. That question there. Pets. Is this a pet-friendly area and who walks pets? Because the neighbors across the street are going to walk their pets on any sidewalks you have and open spaces. Is this designed for handling animals the long way to the Davies? Because when we talk sidewalks and the need for the rest of people transiting this area, the one thing I notice when I'm either doing physical therapy in the building that didn't choose to play or that and I'm looking out the windows on these areas that I see a lot of people out walking pets these days.

I would hope it's a decision by the owner but I would encourage pets. We have the amenity space to be able to provide pet wash area. The greenway is the perfect access. So yeah, I would definitely say pets are welcome. I think my illustratives did have a pet so they're in there. It's a theoretical dog. Okay. I guess one last or two last quick points. One, disruptions, major disruptions for a short period of time. Have we thought about how that would be handled? One I'm thinking of comes up in about four weeks and it's going to shut down the street on both sides for about half a day. It's called the Fourth of July Parade and if you think about what the city does in celebrating, it takes a parade

from the courthouse all the way down to downtown, back up University, across in front of City Hall and back to the courthouse. So when that parade route is shut down, what do you think happens to access for your tenants? I will add turkey trot. Yes. Clothes down University. And there are things along this line. Are there things that need to be considered to handle those kind of activities? I'm glad you asked the question. I think that's something we would have to engage with the city on in terms of better understanding what the parade route is. Hopefully the parade's not both on University and Chainbridge. It is a vote. So that's going to be something that we're going to have to figure out because our site

doesn't have any more road connection locations. Davies had the same question. Yeah. And the more we develop this area, it impacts some of those things that become disruptive for design. Welcome recommendations, by the way, if you have a recommendation. Okay. And aside from that, one, historically, downtown has had a lot of red brick from an architectural standpoint. Scout on the Circle doesn't have a lot of red brick. red brick. So red brick is partly the identifier from Colonial Williamsburg and that the city had for a history. The question is whether anybody here still remembers back that far and if red brick is still the thing. But it is one of the things that is discussed for many of the

developments in the Old Town area. So the more red brick generally in looking at it, I mean, if I looked at this, I would say, hey, that's current development. That is designed as it looks today. I would not have seen that built 40 years ago. It would have had a different character. Or 50 years ago, and I can see the character of what was built then. Because that's what's coming down. So red brick and architecture review is a problem of the history. I think we have talked in looking at it. Other than that, I think you've got, you've come a long way and I hope the greenway mates well with Davies on the grade level. Because that has been a big discussion too. Do we get here and now you can jump down a

seven foot wall and pick up the greenway going next to it? Yeah. I had to figure that out. That was not easy to figure out. And my colleagues in my Chantilly office did that project. So I made sure that they were connected at the same elevation. But it goes back though to the point I was raising earlier in terms of who goes first. We don't know. I mean, we're moving fast and furious and we'd like to see the development move forward, obviously. And the timing of Davies, I don't think anybody in this room has the answer to that question. But we're going to make it work either way. Okay. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate all of the effort that's gone into it. I think this is a step forward as the small area

plan indicates. And as we recognize that redevelopment is going to occur, the question is how many people, how dense, what's it going to do to traffic? Because we're not done with this discussion. Yep. Anytime soon. Thank you, sir. Were there others? Ms. Luckert. May I raise one sort of concluding question for my colleagues? We didn't talk about height, surprisingly, and that is always a sore subject. Can we do a quick sort of roll call on how we feel about it? We will. We'll get to my comments. But yeah. Fair. Fair. Not to usurp. But... Mr. I just think gut check on this might be interesting before your comments. I'm happy to hold until you give your piece. Honestly, I'm not too bothered by the height.

I did just have a practical question of why do you have to go that high? Because Davies seemed to get the same density with the less stories. So is there just a practical reason why it had to be? Six? Six? Historical. We talked a lot more about that. I'm saying for this one, if Davies would ever get to the same density with less stories. We have a lot more commercial on our project than they do. One of the things that was really important. So that's a big difference. And we needed to carve out space, obviously, to make up for that much non-residential space. Yeah. Because they were zoning from residential to urban, where you guys are going from office to urban. So I think it makes sense that

you have more commercial space given it's actually a big net decrease in what we have today. City Council was very important. When our conversations with council members and some citizens, it was very important that we keep as much office space as possible, especially knowing across the street, as you were discussing earlier about small offices, a bunch of lawyers and stuff like that, that was important to a lot of city council members. Council members. And so that's why we've got a lot more. We've got a whole entire first floor of building A is either retail or office. The second floor of building A is all office. So we're trying to balance both sides of it. And if you look at the Davies versus us, I would think that

our compare the two, if I don't know if Fred's got this, we've got a lot of, there's a lot more, I would say, usable open space. Even though it's on top of a parking deck, it is, you know, a lot of open space that can be used. Yeah, I think the step back on the university helps. And I think having four stories is the limit. And with some stepping back is quite helpful. We are sort of at five and a half stories on the chambered side and for a few of the buildings with some of the accessories up on the roof. But I'm not particularly concerned about the height. I think this is, in my opinion, qualitatively better than the massing of buildings in the Davies proposal. And we're getting more open space.

It's not, you know, the ideal that I have in my mind, but it comes closer. And so the height is a byproduct of that. And it doesn't give me any concerns as long as we can work out some of the other smaller issues, traffic being one of those. I like the step down onto university. And I think that the pool and the fitness center are a unique asset that will make this a very attractive rental location. I do feel like the massing on Jane Bridges is too significant for what I would want to see there. And it's not a wide road. It's going to start to feel very claustrophobic as if all development kind of pushes the envelope on how high it can build. So that would be my concern is the proximity and the height of the

Cambridge Road side. Others at this point? I'm personally okay with the height, I think. If I could just make one point before I yield. You're asking for a fair amount of exceptions. And I think development is always just about tradeoffs, right? And the greenway is a great public benefit, I think. And when I think about the project, you've taken a parcelized, auto-dependent lot, bringing it together, I think there's a lot of good. But in my head, if you take away that greenway, I don't know if all the asks necessarily meet the public benefit. So to his point of like a rooftop restaurant, whether or not I'm not writing your pro forma for you, I get it. But if that could just be something that you think, what more, if anything,

could be done? Again, just to meet the tradeoffs. And there'll always be people that are upset or a townhouse complex that is more adversely affected than, you know, others. But it's all about the greater good. So I would just ask that you kind of think through that a little bit more and see if there's anything more you can do. Understood. Thank you. Just a couple of additional things from my perspective. Appreciate all the good comments from my colleagues here. Let me just start with the height. On the university side, I'm actually a little concerned that very superficially it reads four stories from university. But it's a very short step back before it goes tall with the fitness center. I think actually one of the things that

was done very well at the Davies property is the way University Drive reads. It's four stories, pretty much full depth of an accommodation unit. That's not what it looks like here. I want to see some bulk plane sort of renderings and so forth to see how it really reads. Breckenridge expressed this concern as well. I'm not sure it reads the way it should as four stories along university. It's kind of a superficial nod to it. But I think it's probably still too close to the University Drive before it jumps up again with a fairly big, massive glass up there. As far as the Cambridge Road side, I'm not terribly concerned by either. It doesn't seem to be too different from some of the heights of today's buildings.

I think you described some of those. I'll get another shot at this since I'm the Planning Commissioner rep on the Board of Architectural Review. So when that comes up, you'll see me again. And I'm not going to presume to tell you what the bar will think. But there is incorporation of red brick on your own initiative. And I think that's a good thing that you'll probably get positive feedback on. One of the things that the bar has talked about in the past is how we mix the ancient and the modern. And there are good ways to do that, many representations of that in Europe, for example. And I think you've made a very good effort. So we'll see how the bar feels about it. I'm pretty favorably impressed with what

I've seen so far. I have a little bit of a concern, the idea of the sidewalk. No sidewalk, actually, along the south side of your property, along the street on the other property, we've got the greenway coming through and it more or less dead ends. There's no place for pedestrians to go except across the street. There's no landing zone, no nothing, no connection to university, no connection to Cambridge from your property. So that concerns me. I think it was our expectation that ultimately there will be sidewalks on both sides of that street. You're not providing one on the north side of your own private drive, which is a special request for you. So it'll have to be looked at. But I'm a little concerned about particularly

how the greenway more or less dead ends without a safe space except to cross the street. And we have no idea what that crossing is going to look like at this point. Right. I will, as echo the concern, the comment of my colleague, Mr. Cunningham, about to congratulate you on the ability to consolidate all the properties but the one. But the most important one was the southernmost property to provide a really cohesive development. I commented early on and just reiterate, when you really look at the small area plan, there was not a concept presented when this was developed six or more years ago to even do anything with those office spaces. But there's continued to be concern, as you've indicated, the grade, the quality

of the office. Not the best that it could be. Certainly not the highest and best use of the property in the city. You've brought a very commendable concept, I think. Let's try to meet some of our housing needs. Try to preserve some of the office space. We're obviously not losing office space in the city as a consequence of this, which is an ongoing concern. Anytime we lose commercial property, we put more and more burden on the residents and on the city for providing services to residents. Nevertheless, the world's different than it was when the small area plan was put together. And we have to recognize that. And we'll be having our next work session on how we update our small area plans to kind of

reflect current reality. But I think directionally, this is a good thing. Still some concerns. You've heard them expressed a number of times here. So any other comments? Can I just ask three quick ones? Please. Sorry. And by the way, I just walked this block the other day. This is a huge step up. So despite my questions, this is the last major block in Old Town South. So I want to make sure that we have been thorough in our review because it's kind of the last crack. We're going to get it to making sure the small area plan comes to life. On my one quick question is building C, all residential. Is there a reason for that, especially given what you heard from the city around maintaining as much

commercial as possible and given that the parking entrances are right there? One of the things when we were looking at this, the viability of any retail or office. I mean, unless I'm renting it to a CPA firm, a law firm, it's, you know, you couldn't have, you could probably have a cleaners, which has chemicals. I don't know if you want to do that there. We just didn't think that would be, could survive. Okay. We're thinking 123 is what's going to give, is that's your front door. That's what you want it to be. And you're talking about traffic. If I have retail and office on, you know, the university side, then I've got traffic that's parking on that end. You got a lot of activity on that end.

So I'm thinking people are going to access the retail from me. I'm saying you, you think people are going to access the current retail? Cause I've got to go over to that side to get to the garage, right? To get to the restaurants and whatnot that are in building a, you're saying that's all going to come off of chain bridge. Hold on. Um, I mean, that's, this is the interest is the upper parking garage. Yeah. So if you come in on university, you'll be coming in this road right here, which is above this and you'll be coming down and then you'll be pulling in here, going in here and parking. And there's a specific, uh, uh, elevator that says office and retail. So you won't be using the residential elevator.

It's very specific for that thing. Plus there, that's why one of the reasons why we had parking sitting on, on that plaza area was to give keeping people towards one 23. Yeah. Okay. I'll add in the rate in the Davies development, clear, um, guidance, pushback, and the concern on the part of the residents along university to not put commercial on university. Thanks for that. So it just doesn't lend itself to that. They did mention that for sure. Um, just to echo, I think a couple of my colleagues comments on the sidewalk, most recently chair feather, you said you coordinate a lot with the Davies folks. I think at the Jane, one of the January city council meetings, they had said that you guys were going to build the sidewalk on the

north side of the shared road. Did they tell you that? That was before coordination. That was before coordination meetings. It was nice of them to go ahead and play on our site. Wasn't it? I mean, like to chair feathers point, I think that is an important sidewalk. I, I, I, there's, there's a, on every situation, there's a balancing act. So just so we walk through it, this is a picture of the thing. So we can put a five foot sidewalk along here. That means all of that. All that green, all that green was gone. All it's going to be is a five foot sidewalk on the, on the, basically this is this. Harvey. It shows the Davies are on the side of your building. Oh. Oh, yeah. How do you get back to our, you know, presentation with more

of yours. Yeah. Sorry. That's okay. See, for me, that's like a side yard for our building. It's windows there, things like that. So it's not, I mean, I don't have a sidewalk going along the side of my house. And we don't have really any connection. We don't really have any connection points except for one location where we do provide a sidewalk. And Davies has the sidewalk on the side. Your point with regards to having a landing area is an excellent one, though, in terms of when someone is on the greenway and comes up against that roadway, it's just an, an, an abrupt, um, Exactly. Interface point. And perhaps we need to revisit that as, as suggested, which we will. Oh, yeah. Let me just go through.

Look at the side of the building. Look at the side of, no, back. Go back here. It's the Davies Road. There. Yep. Look at the side of that building, the structuring of the wall. You really want a sidewalk against a building with no entrances on it. And all you have is road, sidewalk, and wall, the building wall. That, to me, is not a real amenity or something that's going to get used very much. That, you know, you're better off. Well, there's a sidewalk on the other side of the street. Right. There's a sidewalk on the green side of the street. So, if you take those trees out and put a sidewalk in there, all you're doing is walking up against building wall that has no doors, no entrance. You're on the side of a massive structure that I don't think makes anybody feel safe

walking up that kind of a long street. And our thought process. And an uphill area. It's not an amenity type area. I'm not suggesting it is an amenity. It's more so for folks to dump off the greenway. The sidewalk's on the south side of that road on the Davies property. We understand what your comment is. Yeah, we understand. But going back to Commissioner Rice's comment would be that look at what, like you were talking about walkability and putting a walk, like a bridge across to slow traffic down. On the greenway on Davies, we should coordinate with them about having this on. The walkway, like right now, the Davies things is just showing a road right here. Always love us when you can't. Right here where the greenway crosses into this,

or to our property. That should be like a speed table. Right. So you can, it's naturally going to slow down. And that way it crosses over from our, from the Davies properties to our project. And it makes it a continuous walkway across. Right. And that would probably help on both sides, on both Davies and on our project. Got it. Okay. Last question. My favorite topic, the east-west cross through street. Did you look at any other, like I'm sure you did, but what other options did you study that maybe wouldn't have required that street? Like could you have serviced these buildings from that road we were just talking about that you share with Davies? Is there any version of this plan that doesn't require an additional mid-block across through street?

I, when we looked at it, Davies was, was still being approved. Um, and if you looked at how that is, you're coming off of, I, I think Davies has got a problem because you coming off of judicial, taking a right, or taking a left, and then taking immediate right if you're going to try to get in there. That's, that is, you want to talk about traffic problems? I think that's traffic problems right, right up front. Okay. Agreed. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Any questions for us? Anything more you'd like to hear from us? I, I just like to make a good comment. Uh, first of all, again, uh, thank you. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Members of the planning commission. Thank you for the feedback. We've got a lot of note takers here.

Um, you've got some ideas spinning. I was talking to Tom about, especially Chairman Feather's comment. I have an idea, which, uh, we will kick around and see if we can try to find a, uh, consensus, uh, approach that addresses this. And the last thing, I was remiss to share before. I just wanted to thank staff. Uh, staff has been very helpful, uh, to us as the applicant as we've gone through this process. And, uh, without their counsel and guidance, um, we would not be nearly as far along in the process as we are. So I just want to make sure that, uh, I put that out there. Thank you very much. Thank you. It's come, it's come a long way fast. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Frederick and crew.

It's always excellent work for support the commission. Okay. Our next work session. Let Mr. Napdi, uh, take the seat. He's on a discussion of potential review and update to the adopted small area plans for old town, North facts, camp, Washington, Dan, bear back circle. Thank you. Chair Feather and members of the planning commission. Uh, the purpose of this work session is to discuss a potential review and update to our small area plans. Just, I can take a break. Can we need to pause? Can we need to pause? Okay. Oh, okay. Please continue. Okay. Uh, our goals tonight are to explain to the commission, the reasons for potentially updating the small area plans, share some topics that staff proposes reviewing,

uh, as part of this effort as to discuss a potential schedule and receive feedback from the planning commission on the overall scope and timeline. As a quick review on the smaller your plans, uh, the idea for smaller plans was generated with the 2019 comprehensive plan. Uh, at that time, we already had mixed use areas designated, uh, in the city. And the intent was that, uh, we would need the smaller your plans to help provide additional guidance on how to create cohesive development as development happens on a piecemeal basis, uh, to contribute toward a central vision in each of these areas. Since that time, we have created and adopted four smaller your plans. The fifth one for picket and Maine,

uh, is not seen as a priority at this time. And we don't have a schedule for proceeding with that one. Uh, the timeline for the, uh, creation and adoption of the smaller your plans, uh, and the comprehensive plan, uh, looking forward is shown on the slide. So starting with 2019, uh, in the comprehensive plan was rewritten at that time. The comprehensive plan was last rewritten back in 2004. So this was a major change, uh, with a lot of new recommendations for the city. And this was the genesis of when the idea for smaller your plans was created. Uh, and then, as we mentioned, since that time, we have, uh, established smaller plans for the old town, North facts, camp Washington, and Fairfax circle,

smaller plans with Fairfax circle being the last one adopted in 2024. Right around that same time, we had completed a review of the comprehensive plan, uh, in accordance with state code. The state code, uh, requires that we review the comprehensive plan every five years and determine if we want to update it or not, we're not required to update it, but we must review it at that time. Planning commission might recall at that time, we also questioned whether we should review the smaller plans at the same time. And we agreed that it would be best, uh, to hold that off and to do that under a separate effort. Uh, and so the smaller plans, uh, are now coming back. Uh, as a, as a potential to review,

uh, which is what we're discussing tonight. I want to point out on this slide, there's a, uh, some items are highlighted with orange. Those are items, uh, where we created a new document. Um, so the rewrite of the comprehensive plan, for example, uh, was one of those. And then the initial creation of each of the smaller plans, um, happened after that. Uh, all the items that are not highlighted are where we're just proposing, reviewing or updating documents. So the 2024 update of the comprehensive plan was just a review, and update the current conference plan, not a complete rewrite. So now we're proposing, uh, beginning an effort. And, uh, as we get to our schedule, we'll see, we hope to wrap up,

uh, in 2028 is a review of all four adopted smaller plans. This is not a rewrite, uh, just a review similar to the review of the comprehensive plan that was done in 2024. Following the schedule per the state code of reviewing each document every five years, then we would then subsequently review the comprehensive plan. And then five years later, uh, review the smaller plans again. Uh, then looking at the schedule out to 2034, 2035, we're highlighting the comprehensive plan again, suggesting this would be an appropriate time to do a complete rewrite. Uh, we don't have to make decisions on that right now. In the past, we have the city's in-city's history. We have tended to, uh, rewrite our comprehensive plan about every 15 years.

This would make sense. Uh, but again, if we decided to do it sooner, we could, or if we think things are functioning at that time, uh, we could, uh, just do a review at that time as well. But this is kind of a conceptual framework. Uh, and the reason we want to point this out, the difference between creating new documents and reviewing them, uh, is because some questions have come up about the, uh, smaller plan zoning ordinance update effort that's currently underway. Um, so we're showing that, uh, highlighted here, um, in 2026, we've had a couple of work sessions on this with the planning commission and we back to you in July with another work session. Uh, and this is an effort that is intended to begin to implement recommendations of the smaller your plan.

So we began this, uh, shortly after we completed the Fairfax circle smaller plan in 2024. Uh, so we're still working on it. We hope to finish it up this year. Uh, but this is really the next thing that comes in line. And so even though we will be reviewing and potentially updating our smaller plans, uh, we still recommend that we proceed with, um, doing the zoning ordinance update, uh, per our original schedule. Uh, we can always come back and amend this in the future if needed. So the, the timeline for this potential, uh, smaller plan reviews, uh, we're not set at a certain, at a, um, at a definite schedule yet, but we're proposing to you now is that we're, we're discussing the scope initially with you now and plan to come back to you later in the year,

um, to confirm the scope with you. And then we could begin the work, uh, in early 2027. Uh, what we're showing in this chart is with the analysis that we plan to do associated with the smaller plan reviews. We've broken it up into two categories, those that could be led by city staff and those that require consultant analysis. Uh, those that could be led by city staff, we could begin, um, at any time. Uh, those that require consultant analysis will have a cost associated with them. So depending on what we iron out with the planning commission city council for the scope for this project, we'll determine, uh, what consultants will be needed to help us go forward. Uh, and then we would request for funds in the upcoming budget cycle to go towards this effort.

Uh, those funds would not be available until the next fiscal year, which would be mid 2027. Uh, and so those analysis could then begin to happen at that time. So that's why there's two different timeframes there. Um, but city staff will be coordinating throughout and we could begin formating a document, um, throughout as well. Uh, so under the schedule, we believe that we would be able to, um, get through this effort, um, by about mid 2028. Um, so the types of topics, uh, that will be considered, um, we will step through each of these, um, as part of the goal for tonight's discussion. Uh, but we've broken it up here into those again that we can do in house that we can, uh, begin, uh, as soon as we have time available,

uh, and those that we would require consultant support for. And so what we're asking you to think about as we go through these is, uh, which of these are most important for those that do have, uh, that do require consultant support would have costs associated with them. Um, uh, be thinking about how important they are to include. Uh, we don't have actual cost estimates at this time, but we do hope to come back to you, uh, in the future with those. Uh, and then also think about things that are important to you that may not be covered, uh, in these subjects. And so we can, uh, look at other analysis that might need to be done and determine if those can be done in house or if we need to, uh, seek consultant support for those as well.

Um, as I mentioned, we do, we are recommending reviewing and updating all four plans concurrently, even though they're all adopted at different times. Uh, the main reason for this is that a lot of the analysis that are listed here, uh, if we're doing the analysis for one, uh, activity center, it makes sense to do them all at the same time. It's very little additional effort. Uh, and so it was much more efficient. In addition to that, it would allow us to bring all of our plans, uh, when it comes to formatting, bring them into the same format, um, and make them, uh, more consistent with each other. Uh, we didn't identify it in the schedule, but we would obviously, uh, do significant community and stakeholder collaboration,

uh, as we're doing these analysis and, um, and updating the plans. Uh, and also, as I mentioned, we plan to come back to you at a future work session to confirm the scope before we begin the work. So we'll now step through, uh, each of the topics, as I mentioned. Uh, the first one, uh, and the color code at the bottom left, if it's orange, uh, means that it's something we can do in house. If it's blue, it means that we would need consultant support. And I'll remind you of each of those as we go through them. Uh, so the first is a policy review. This is looking at, uh, all city policies that have been adopted, uh, or completed since the smaller plans were adopted. Um, uh, we do this as, when we update the comprehensive plan as well,

our, our policies and direction from various entities are always changing, and we need to make shifts to accommodate that. So similar to how we had to do that for the comprehensive plan, uh, we can use that as a resource for when we're updating the comprehensive, for the smaller year plans. Uh, so a couple of examples are shown here and there'll be others as well. The urban forest master plan was adopted last December. Uh, a lot of recommendations in there related to, uh, the physical development, particularly in activity centers. Uh, this involves creating connected green spaces, conducting what they call the three 30, 300 analysis, uh, where we, um, set up goal of having three trees, three mature trees visible from any residents,

place of work to school, uh, set a goal of 30% tree canopy coverage and neighborhoods, um, and ensure that every property is within 300 meters of a public green space. Um, there are general recommendations on improving connectivity for green spaces, uh, by establishing networks. Um, and there's a recommendation to conduct a forested area analysis, which is, uh, something that is in with a near term scope, uh, for urban forestry division. Uh, and this would, uh, look at specific areas of the city, uh, and look at the specific conditions for, uh, natural conditions and those types of things. And if any of those happen to be in or near activity centers, that would provide guidance on how we want to,

uh, manage them. Uh, we have the affordable housing strategic plan that was approved in February. Uh, a lot of the recommendations here are in line with what was already in our comprehensive plan, but there might be more specific recommendations that will help us identify specific parcels where we might want to support or encourage, uh, partnerships to accomplish, uh, affordable housing. There are also recommendations about maintaining what we call naturally occurring affordable housing. Uh, so those recommendations might affect the plans as well. Uh, another example is the smaller plans zoning ordinance amendments. Uh, there will be recommendations or actually requirements that come out of this

effort that will set more specific numeric standards than we have in the smaller plans. Uh, um, density recommendations in the smaller plans in terms of units per acre. Um, and the way our draft zoning ordinance amendments are now, we will be adding, uh, that type of provision. So that will give us better expectations on how much development we should expect on each site. Other things that are underway, uh, green building policy, uh, city council is having a discussion on in a couple of weeks. Um, that might have some, some information on specific recommendations on some of the smaller plans, particular North X, uh, that has direct recommendations related to that. The move Fairfax transportation study is currently underway.

A piece of that is the old town circulation study, which will have direct recommendations for old town. Uh, but there'll also be recommendations citywide on, on pedestrian safety parks and recreation strategic master plan is also underway. We expect there'll be recommendations in there about facility needs, uh, that may be able to be accommodated, uh, with the smaller plans. And then others, there are numerous other studies that are always going on. Uh, so we'll look through those to see where we should, um, find guidance to address the smaller plans. A similar task is, uh, not looking at just policies, but specific projects. Uh, there are specific location based projects that are underway, uh,

that may change the recommendations of the smaller plans. And this could include private development projects as well as city investments. Uh, so for example, a, uh, study is currently underway on the floodplain area in Fairfax circle. Uh, there are a lot of recommendations in that smaller plan that related to the floodplain. Uh, and so the results of this study might, um, change the way, uh, we look at that area. Old town circulation study I just mentioned, uh, also, uh, study currently, or that will begin soon, uh, with more detailed, uh, analysis of the Fairfax circle intersection. Uh, as you might recall, when we developed the Fairfax circle smaller plan, there was some uncertainty about what that might look like.

And so we had to make some assumptions. Um, and then another example is the Eaton Place Chambers Road intersection. Um, at the time the Northfax smaller plan was developed. There was a certain model that was, um, envisioned for that intersection. It was a traffic circle and there was assumptions that were made based on that design. That design has since changed. So that affected not only the intersection, but what we can do with Eaton Place. And so at the time there was recommendations to do a road diet in Eaton Place. Um, but now with the changes that have been implemented and that are further proposed at the Eaton Place Chambers Road intersection, um, we'll have to rethink that road diet configuration because it won't align with,

uh, that new design. Uh, we propose also doing what we call a property impact analysis. So we'll be looking at each parcel in each of the, uh, small area plans and looking at those types of, uh, public improvements and amenities that are on each property. Uh, the majority of these are new streets and streetscapes and new publicly accessible open spaces. And so there are some properties, um, in some of the smaller plans that have a lot of areas that are proposed to have these types of amenities, uh, and some that have very few or, or none. And so what that results in is that there's kind of a burden on some properties and other properties are able to move forward with development recommendations that have very little contributing factors to the

public good. And so we, uh, our plans look at this would be to use the more specific standards that we hope to get out of the zoning ordinance, um, and get a better idea of how each individual property is impacted and perhaps redistribute some of those, uh, public goods so that, um, those, they're more evenly distributed. Uh, uh, uh, a tree canopy analysis was conducted in 2023 as a precursor to the urban forest master plan. This is a tool that we did not have available to us, um, before the majority of our smaller plans, the Fairfax circle smaller plane was underway at the time. Um, but this is something that we can use to identify locations for specific trees or stands of trees, um, that are within the activity centers and determine if there are any that are,

um, have enough value to them that we would want to adjust the plans to protect them. Uh, and so this is something that we would be able to use as an initial tool. We would go out and fair field verify. Um, this is something that is, is something that is, um, can be done. I think at the activity center level, it'd be more difficult to do citywide. Uh, but our TV centers are small enough and they are also intentionally located in areas that have less forested areas. And so there shouldn't be too many of these, uh, but those that are there, it makes sense to put forth the effort to try to protect them. Uh, other reoccurring issues. So, uh, this gets more into, uh, more subjective, uh, matters,

uh, but just on our experience for the past couple of years of seeing development projects or private investment efforts go forward, the types of feedback that we've, we've gotten, uh, where we might want to revisit some of the recommendations of the plans. Uh, these are not the kind of things that can be backed up by analysis. It's more about doing stakeholder outreach, having community meetings and hearing people think about what's in the plan. So, uh, maximum building heights is one that we've heard about a lot. Um, another one we've heard about a lot is where ground floor commercial uses are specifically recommended. Um, there have been concerns from developers and in many cases that they don't think,

um, commercial uses are viable in all locations. And so that's something that we could continue to review. Uh, others that we are just listing just as examples, not necessarily that have to be included, but, uh, density is a new factor that will be included. Open spaces, where they are in the plans, what character they have, are they, are they, are they meeting, um, uh, the goal of having benefits to the overall community, not just the activity center and those types of things. And then general formatting, as we review the plans, we would then, um, adjust the documents. Uh, again, something that we have experienced in, in our using these documents now for about six years, uh, is how easy they are to follow,

uh, where there are different recommendations on different topics fall in each plan. Sometimes they're, they're not consistent. Uh, and sometimes it's difficult to find various types of recommendations for a single property. So you're looking at one part of the document for, for height, another one for uses. Uh, and so we want to make sure that they are usable for all users. Um, city staff has become pretty proficient in this, but we're not everybody. And so we recognize that, um, if somebody wants to know what's proposed, uh, near their house, they should be able to find that pretty easily. Same thing for somebody who's interested in redeveloping their property. They should be able to pretty easily understand what's expected of them.

Okay. So getting into, uh, some of the efforts that we might need, uh, consultant support for, uh, there are a series of numerical analysis that we propose that we, uh, at least consider including, uh, in this review. Uh, so a market analysis, um, could answer, or actually multiple market analysis, uh, could help answer some several questions that have come up. Um, as a planning commission is aware, there are projected, uh, development trends in each of the smaller plans in terms of how much development we expect, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to have interest in over the next 10 to 15 years in terms of housing, uh, office retail, hotel, those types of things. Um, as was just discussed with the application we just had,

trends have changed over the past couple of years. And so we should be thinking about how we should adjust those expectations, uh, but also answer questions about specific uses. So office has been one of the most volatile types of uses over the past couple of years. Um, and so there's been a lot of interest in replacing office, but we have also, uh, heard feedback from our, uh, economic development department that, uh, some of our office, um, types of office uses are pretty strong. And so we want to be careful about how much we're willing to displace and what factors we might want to consider. Um, and we might even want to consider physical changes to the plans to identify specific, uh, office areas that should be,

uh, retained. Uh, traffic is something that, that often comes up. Uh, there was a very high level traffic analysis that was conducted with the initial smaller plans. Uh, so how much detail we get into this, um, will depend on what types of questions we're trying to answer, but the more detail we get into, um, the higher the costs and effort will be. Uh, and this is one where the costs can get really, really high. And so we'll have to be very careful, uh, careful with that. Um, but we will want to look at things like, um, how overall traffic trends could be affected by, uh, different types of development. Uh, one thing to be aware of here though, is that, uh, the, if we want to have any kind of specificity,

we had to make a lot of assumptions. Um, the smaller plans aren't specific about what uses have to go where they're intentionally open so that we create a mixed use environment. So it doesn't suggest that a specific site has to be a specific site. It has to be housing or has to be, uh, office except in a couple of, um, specific circumstances for various reasons. But for the most part, they are intentionally broad and flexible. And so traffic analysis can be dependent on, uh, specific locations being, or specific uses being at specific locations. And so, uh, we just have to be mindful that we might not be able to get to the type of specificity that we get with the types of traffic analysis that come with individual development projects and those types of things.

Because they have much more detail than we will be able to have at a higher level. Uh, utility analysis, uh, something else that came about tonight, uh, is a suggestion at looking at, uh, some of our utilities, particularly sanitary and stormwater, uh, what our capacities are, if there are any locations, um, that are really getting close to their limits where we might want to, uh, limit the amount of development that, that feeds a particular utility area. The last two, uh, we believe we can do in house because they're actually already underway. And so we'll just be using them as resources. The first is level of service standards. Uh, and so the idea is, is that we use the level of service study that's currently underway.

We expect it'll be wrapping up in the next couple of months. Um, but that is providing some background analysis on impacts to some of the city services from development. Um, that can include things like schools, uh, public safety parks and those types of things. And while that will have its own, it has its own intended use of, uh, being used to help identify proffers, the data that's behind it, um, is something more than we typically get. And we can help use that to identify how we might want to manage growth in our activity centers as a whole. Uh, fiscal impact is something else that we do in house typically, uh, and so we have thought about doing kind of a higher level fiscal impact analysis,

uh, to determine how implementation of smaller plans will actually impact the city from a fiscal basis, uh, based on future growth, uh, trends. Uh, another item, um, that would, uh, involve needing consultant support. Uh, this is something that, uh, is specifically recommended in the North factory, smaller plan and has been supported by some other historic resources, studies that the city has done. Uh, that's a, to do a, what they call a mid century commercial theme analysis. Um, and the idea here is that, um, a good portion of the city developed, uh, particularly commercial areas developed during the mid 20th century. They have certain architectural and design characteristics, uh, some of which we're trying to move forward with and eliminate,

but others, uh, have kind of a nostalgic sense to them that we might want to, uh, try to protect. And so particular areas were identified in the North fact, small year plan, but there might be other structures and sites throughout the city that we would want to focus on. And so, uh, this effort would look at identifying some of those. Uh, it's already been identified that, that we likely don't have any, uh, other sites, uh, that would fall into this category that actually, um, qualify to be on the national register of historic places like the 29 diner does. Um, but it might be able to provide us some informal, um, recommendations on, on sites to try to protect. Um, this again is optional and it would require,

uh, consultant support. Uh, so that summarizes the, the types of themes that the staff is recommending to include. At this time, as I mentioned, we won't begin this effort likely until early 20, 27. Um, and we, uh, the extent of it would depend on, uh, how much of the effort is dependent on consultant analysis, but we would love to hear feedback from the planning commission on whether you think we should proceed with this review, uh, and whether there are topics in here that are more important than others or any that you think we might be missing. Uh, that's all I have for the staff report. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioners. Ms. Lugger. I think the traffic study is an absolute, absolute necessity,

but I think it doesn't need to be predictive based on what we envisioned for the small area plans. I think it needs to be current state. Um, because if I recall, we don't have data. When was the last significant traffic study done in the city? It's been a long time. I think, uh, it depends what you mean by traffic study. It's been kind of a variety of types of analysis. So, but yeah, for current data, tracking, sorry, general throughput tracking through the city trips. Uh, yeah, there was a analysis that was done with the multimodal transportation plan around 2017. That's what I was thinking. Yeah, I was going to say 2018. So I think just current state would be a huge asset across multiple projects that the city's

looking at. Um, I don't think we need to get predictive. We can leave that up to individual developers, but if we can identify the pain points and codify those in the small area plan, like you cannot make this intersection worse, or you cannot impact, you know, turns or, you know, at a different entry in this particular thoroughfare. This is where you can have a light. This is where you can't, et cetera. I think that's a level of granularity that's missing from the current plans that, that gets lost in discussion. So I would say that's top priority worth the money just in terms of utilization across the, across the city's efforts. Um, can you clarify a little bit when you say market versus financial analysis,

what those would contain or not contain? Um, I'm asking in the context of, we've had some projects not go through based on financing, finance availability. I would assume that's a reflection on their long-term viability commercially. So do we cover that sort of analysis or is that a bridge too far? It's, it's something that we don't get into, uh, because a lot of that is dependent on the, uh, the function of the organization who's trying to do the development. Uh, and so it's, it's very difficult for us to try to, to predict that. So a higher level market analysis can try to, um, without pinpointing any specific types of development, can try to get a better understanding of where the demand is,

uh, for various types of uses, uh, or certain types of facilities in the city. Um, but the, the financing market is just, aside from the fact that it fluctuates based on who it is, um, it's, it also tends to fluctuate very much, very, very quickly over the course of a year. And so, uh, the effort that we put into trying to do something like that would become obsolete, I think, very quickly. So then the financial analysis you're talking about is impact of the city, cost of the city. Yeah. So the, the market analysis is predicting demand. And then the, what we call the fiscal analysis is that if a development happens, um, is that beneficial to the city? Is it negative to the city? And how much so?

Yes. Mr. Royce. So I wrote down a couple of things, um, that hopefully we'd touch on in, and you have touched on a few. I think the flooding potentially in Fairfax circle area and looking broadly at potential hazards that may impact development. That's a big issue. And I think, um, flooding in particular has come up repeatedly in the North fact, small area plan. And in the Fairfax circle, small area plan, less so old town and camp Washington. But I think keeping our eyes on that is obviously an important one. And having that be part of the context and how we discuss areas, um, something I spend quite a bit of time during the summers as a fellow of the Virginia climate center is to look at urban heat issues.

And, um, the data we collected in 2025 does show some areas of the city with significant heat problems. And I think that if we, uh, understood that better, uh, we could perhaps as part of a small area plan, we could insert some mitigation measures. Um, this would obviously overlap greatly with the tree canopy analysis and some of those issues. But I think looking at, um, uh, urban heat more broadly and finding design elements or ways within, you know, an entire small area to mitigate those or make those less significant would be helpful. Um, it's quite surprised at the level of heat up in Fairfax circle relative to the other parts of the city. Uh, rusty Russell and I, he helped me design the last,

uh, exercise we did in, in July of 2025. And, um, we expected camp Washington to be the problem and it was not the problem. It was, uh, according to what we see right now, um, camp Washington, um, it was Fairfax circle. Um, I'm interested within the transportation analysis generally. And I think what my colleague just communicated about that is, is it would be very, very useful to not just understand the current state in the city, but slightly over the edges of the city and the County. So a lot of the problems that are generated may be coming from the County, the city making adjustments to their own throughput capability for places like 29 that feed directly into the city where speed limits dropped dramatically in

the lanes narrow. So, um, understanding the dynamic between the County and the city along the edges would be useful as well. Um, something I always mentioned, but it just seemed probably like a lunatic to some people is, uh, this whole idea of thinking about future transportation, transportation and developments that may be coming. We have way Mo and now in Northern Virginia and various places, uh, way Mo being discovered and seen and operated. So, um, I think the idea of being in a position within the next 10 years where we need to make adjustments to our transportation infrastructure to allow autonomous shuttles and sort of a change in what we have now right now, it's just, uh, sort of piecemeal kind of practical ways to have Uber and Lyft pick people up in

certain places. It's a real problem downtown, particularly in a university between, uh, Maine and North street with, uh, cars that stop in the lanes of travel and everybody having to sort of quickly merge around them. Um, formalizing this idea of, uh, uh, uh, infrastructure that would be needed for a great expansion of that sort of ride share and autonomous shuttle concept. I think it sounds sort of science fiction and sort of a futuristic, but I do think we need to have some conversations about what that future of transportation in the city will look like. And if we can make adjustments more quickly than our neighboring jurisdictions, we're going to be a lot better off. Um, so I think within the housing,

um, analysis that we do, obviously density is something that we need to look at and the expectations for density. Um, it's not maybe our position to make recommendations on affordability adjustments, but I think, uh, when we do have developers coming in with affordable housing, I think, um, right now we're at 6% for projects that are of a certain size. And, and I think, um, according to conversations that I've had with Mr. Foreman, I think he's suggesting that we've sort of met the, the metropolitan Washington council on government's estimate for the housing that we need within the city. Um, I, I putting words in his mouth, that probably is inappropriate, but rather than looking at us building a lot more housing,

I think the, uh, provision of affordable housing in some means is probably a, should be a higher priority than it is right now. Um, and that may not be something that we do. That may be something city council does or some future group analyzes again. But, um, I think looking at the mix of housing and affordability issues as always of interest to me. Um, some of those things may not be relevant to a revision of a small area plan or analysis, analysis. But, um, I think at least some of these may touch on elements that already intended to be done. Um, um, I wanted just to mention the, um, synergy. I felt with Cunningham quill and their staff, and they seem to be receptive, responsive, and it seemed to work out well.

I know there are people who have suggested that we should not spend money on contractors coming in and providing plans for us. But I really do think the value that they provided during the, uh, uh, production of the small area plans was substantial. And I'd like that to continue. Others. Mr. Kargi. I'll be quick. I am very much in favor of updating these. I think it's necessary. The last two that we just talked about, well, old, old town and North facts were 2020. That was right before COVID. So things have changed considerably. I think it's time for an update. My question, Paul is on the timing of this, you know, like are you, how are you envision prioritizing? Cause, I'd be curious if we look back over the last two years,

like where is most of the concentration come from in terms of proposals that have come to us in terms of the activity centers? I'm guessing most are old town and North facts. And so those are also the oldest ones. So are you envisioning some type of prioritization where, although I understand the synergies of doing them all at the same time, we would get those, you know, sooner rather than later, or are you thinking they would all come at once? Initially that we, we think they would all come at once. But I think as we go through, there are any particular challenges or additional efforts to have to be done with any of them. We might not want to hold up the other ones. Um, to answer your question.

Yes. The majority of the development proposals we've had have been in old town and in North facts, um, very little in camp Washington and Fairfax circle. Um, but I don't know if that will necessarily affect the schedule. It just seems like the challenge that we are put in and it was shown here tonight is like, what are we holding the line on in these plants? And what are we going to look the other way on or make an exception for? And it's hard when you're dealing with a plan from 2020. So I think the refresh of what do we want it to be in, where are we holding the line on intersections and streetlights and parcels is necessary. Cause we've got these two big ones. I mean, the mega block in the South is basically done at this point.

We've got courthouse coming, you know, like by the time these are updated, a lot of the old town small area plan is going to be committed to. yeah, no, I see your point. Um, we'll have to keep that in mind. It, perhaps there's a way to, um, expedite those two, um, at the expense of holding off the other two a little longer. Uh, there might be some benefit to that. So, yeah, I'll interject with similar concern. I was going to say some of those bright line conversations too are going to happen as part of the zoning islands. So we'll, I think we'll have a lot of those answers before we even get to revisiting the plans. Uh, others. It's going to, I think there's a lot of demographic change going on in the city.

And I think when looking at the small area plans, that's the area where most of the activity is going to take place. That's going to have the thumbprint or fingerprint of government on it. Uh, I guess when I say that and look back and forth, there is good and bad in all of these things we are looking at. When we be moan traffic, we be moan the density that has occurred in this area. And then if we think about it, who are we trying to benefit with traffic? Uh, and, and make it easier. When we look at Virginia route one 23, south of the city and coming into the city, it's a four lane divided road. The traffic moves along very quickly. When you leave the city to the north, it's a four line divided road.

That carries traffic fairly quickly all the way to George Washington parkway. When you look in the city of Fairfax. And we look at the city of Fairfax. On Virginia route one 23, we made a conscious decision to update rest curve. And we made a conscious decision to keep route one 23, a two lane road until you get to route 50. When you put a two lane road in the middle of the snake, so to speak, fast traffic coming in from one side, fast traffic coming in from the other side. And now everybody shrinks down. And we do it so that it would be a bridge that would last for decades and decades from the quality of the construction done. And we made a conscious decision to keep route one 23, a two lane road until you get to route 50.

When you put a two lane road in the middle of the snake, so to speak, fast traffic coming in from one side, and now everybody shrinks down to crawl through. Do you think that was a conscious statement that was made? Because it was. And so what's the intention? Are we trying to speed traffic through the city and make the city more convenient for everybody around us to go through? Or are we trying to design traffic to meet the needs of what we have in the city? And either way, we're going to get significant congestion. Because as we continue to add housing, which we have talked about as being a goal, and we made provision for in our plans, that's where any construction is going to take place. We don't have the land to do additional residential construction in the residential areas.

We have the land in the generous business communities that we have that are now looked on as all parking lots and heat islands. And that's where we're going to put the building. And that's where our plans talk about. So that was a conscious decision to point us in, if we're going to have development and add more people, as it's termed our share for the metropolitan Washington area, then that's where it's going to occur. And that's where it's occurring, as we saw in our project tonight. But if we're going to say we've got enough people in the city, then do we have the right kind of mix of people, the mix of housing and all the things that go with that, and we shut down development, that's going to go on.

But that means that commercial development, real estate development, and the rest is going to depend on the people that are here to pay the freight when it comes to taxes. So one of the challenges that I have, and I've looked at it a long time, is that we are managing density. The whole area is getting more dense. When I came here, which is not that long ago in the big scheme of things, I guess, we were the outlier. The county was less than half a million people and was growing like crazy. And this was where growth was going to occur. It's bypassed us. It's Loudoun County, it's Prince William County, it's the rest. And so we have the density in the middle, but we have a small governing body called the city that still has the county around us.

And when we look at this, I think you've got a good program outline to review what we have in the plans. I think we need serious conversations about transportation because the road structure, which is outlined in the fact book, shows you where the traffic is going to go. And those discussions have occurred when the road connecting University Drive over to Eaton Place went through. And that was a major discussion item. All of these things end up being major discussion items, but never really melded into a concept for getting the kind of laid back city that we would like. We're going to be an active, dense, watch your kids on the streets because of traffic going on, because there are only certain places people can go.

And at the center of it all, this is where it's going to take us going forward. We can't go backwards, so we're managing density. And I think what you've outlined here is excellent. All of the things that come down to looking at what are you working with, what do you want to happen with it, and whether you do studies or not, a good bit of it, I think, comes down to common sense and working with the plans you have to craft a vision and then stick to that vision to implement it to get a desired outcome. So I'm happy with the program you've laid out. But I see a lot of challenges because every one of us has our own idea of how that's going to be done. And that's where the challenge of being a planning commissioner or a city council member or a member of the community who wants to tell your leader how it's supposed to be done to make it fine for me.

And every one of us hears those comments because everybody would like us to make it fine for the way they would like it to work out. And there is no unanimity in any of that. Good luck. Mr. McCarthy, anything from you? I think we've covered it all. Okay. A couple thoughts from my perspective. I continue to seek priorities. You asked about priorities and what may be higher or lower. The whole housing question certainly is one. We've talked about the council of government's numbers, and we sort of rolled them into our plan. I think we need to really step up and decide whether those are the right numbers for us or not. We shouldn't have taken them at face value in the first place. It's certainly been the point of contention in almost every redevelopment proposal that comes up.

So in some respects, I'm disappointed it may take so long to revisit this, but it's certainly a priority if we can do something sooner rather than later. You may be right that our discussion on the zoning text amendments may address some of that. But I think we ought to start thinking about depending less on what those numbers are versus what the right numbers are for us. Your comment about market analysis mentioned office, but we also need to be thinking about retail, because the other feedback we get from economic development is they continue to look for, people continue to look for retail opportunities here in good quality retail space. So I wouldn't just limit it to offices, but we need to make sure retail is part of that discussion, I think.

As far as the mid-century commercial theme, I'd put that lower priority. We've got a lot of mid-century stuff that's not in activity centers, first of all, and we ought to be doing what we can to encourage replacing that and bringing higher and greater use to those parcels. The ones that may be in the activity centers, there are those couple that we talked about. Maybe worth a little bit of a discussion, but I don't think I'd put a lot of effort into it. I think somebody's going to come along with a creative idea in spite of us. So to me, that's probably lower priority. You talked about affordable housing. I think we need to think about, since there is a strategic plan you've talked about, what we want, where we want it, and so forth.

But we've also said in other places we want our affordable housing to be integrated with redevelopment so that it's almost indistinguishable. So we need to figure out how to balance those two as well. Sure, maybe some dedicated communities, but we don't want to be developing projects either. Obviously, there's places like some apartment complexes that are more affordable. But I just think we need to think about what we really want it to look like, how we really want it to integrate into the community. So I think there's a couple of touch points there for us to consider. And I think those are the ones that hit me. Others? Slucker. I was just going to comment from a pacing and scheduling perspective.

I think similar to what we did with the comprehensive plan, as much as we can utilize the work that's ongoing or has already been done and just sort of point to it, we should do that as a cost and time saver. So some of the urban forestry stuff, the housing studies that have been done that are being done, the safety studies, just using those versus kind of recreating the wheel for purposes of the small area plans. I don't see a major budget for consultants being a popular line item with the existing elected body. So I think wherever we can find efficiencies and know exactly what we're pointing them towards, the better. And to that end, I was going to ask a quick question about sort of lessons learned from the previous process.

With some of these feature assets of each of the small areas that are very difficult to achieve when you're relying on the generosity of a developer to participate. I imagine there would be public outcry if we sort of backed off of those. However, you know, reality has now met the plan and we've seen it's very difficult to organize around those. Again, some of them are going to come up in the trade offs with the zoning. But is there messaging? Is there something that we do to kind of right size those public assets that are not currently publicly funded? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think we have a complete answer to that yet. But one of the items in here was to do the property impact analysis.

As I mentioned, the goal there is to redistribute. So the messaging might be that rather than removing or reducing the amount of amenities the community can expect through redevelopment, that it's redistributed so that no particular property owner is burdened to the point where it's unreasonable. Without looking at more detail, we can't guarantee that that's the case. So we'll have to think about it more as we go forward. But I think our goal is really not to reduce the amount of amenities that are included in smaller plans, but try to reorient them to make them more reasonable. And if we can't achieve that, I think we'll have to be honest about it and just say this is unreasonable. And unless the city is willing to invest in it, then it's not going to be achievable.

And, you know, if that changes opinions about smaller plans, then that's the route we'd have to take. But the goal is to redistribute first. Anything else? Okay. Do you have enough info from us at this point? Yes. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. Okay. We'll reconvene our regular meeting and go to Mr. Navtee's staff report. Thank you again, Chair Feather, members of the Planning Commission. Not a whole lot to report from recent council meetings on topics related to the Planning Commission. Going back to May 12th, they did receive a presentation on the accessory dwelling units that you received back in April 13. As you know from the action you took tonight, this will be coming forward to you for public hearing at your next meeting.

On June 2nd, the city council received a presentation from students at Katherine Johnson Middle School on their proposed designs for North Facts and Courthouse Square. This is a presentation the Planning Commission received back in March. For upcoming Planning Commission meetings at our next meeting, June 22nd, we will have the public hearing on the accessory dwelling units zoning ordinance amendments. You will receive a post application work session on the Courthouse Plaza redevelopment proposal. And you will receive a pre-application presentation for proposed development at 3541 Chambridge Road. This is a property at the southeast corner of Chambridge Road and Eaton Place. Currently has two two-story office buildings on it.

The proposal will include a primarily residential townhouse and two over two development with some retail. Again, that's a pre-application proposal. A couple of upcoming things. On this Friday, June 12th, the city ombudsman is hosting a development industry meeting. This is something that is done annually, usually in June, where they invite people who are part of the development community from all scales, from people who do single-family homes to large-scale developments that are involved in our permit process to provide them more information about how the city functions. A lot of that has to do with more permitting type procedures, but there's interest in receiving a presentation on the small airplane zoning ordinance amendments this year.

So, Ms. Denny will be giving that presentation to that group. If you're interested in attending, let me know. I can give you the contact information to Mr. Sebelia, who is doing the RSPs for that, RSVPs for that. Done June 25th, that's a Thursday, will be our next conference of plan implementation group meeting. This one focusing on Old Town. It will be in the City Hall work session room at 9 a.m. Please contact me if you're interested in coming because we have limited capacity at those meetings. That's all we have for the staff report today. Thank you. Any questions for staff? Okay, commission comments. Anybody have something for the good of the body? Mr. Rice, anything from PRAB? The last PRAB meeting coincided with a graduation event I had to attend, so unfortunately I don't have a report.

Mr. Sluggert? Mr. Cunningham? Mr. McCarthy? Mr. Yes. Mr. The only thing for me is the Board of Architecture Review met last week and had a review of the Courthouse Plaza proposed development. Lots of feedback and comments, of course, provided there. And they will be at their next meeting seeing the gallery proposal. I'll be participating in that one remotely. I did the last one as well. But these are a couple of big developments, so keep you posted on those. Without further ado, we are adjourned. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you. Mr. Thank you.

Thank you.